


The grey wolves, the spook and the ration forger

by ars_belli



Category: Foyle's War
Genre: Case Fic, Gen, The Royal Navy, U-boat war, World War II, home front
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-15
Updated: 2015-12-21
Packaged: 2018-05-01 19:33:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 20,787
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5218088
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ars_belli/pseuds/ars_belli
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A seemingly straightforward case of ration forging leaves Foyle gravely injured.  Milner reunites with an old colleague, only to find that the Military Police are above the law.  Sam gets mixed up with the girls from the Royal Canadian Navy.  The Jerries are doing a lot of digging in the flowerbeds.</p><p>Meanwhile, Admiral Karl Doenitz wants his best submarine captains back from their imprisonment in Sussex.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Kivrin](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kivrin/gifts).



Christopher Foyle waited patiently. His stolen gas mask was decidedly uncomfortable, but nothing near as cumbersome as what he had been issued in the trenches in Ypres. He ignored the sweat beading his cheeks and the rubbery taste of the filtered air. He stood before a wheel-locked door, in an anonymous concrete room in a warren of them: except that this one had "DANGER! BREATHING APPARATUS REQUIRED IN FUEL STORAGE" stamped on it in ominous white lettering. An unknown number of guards patrolled the room inside. Any of them might be traitors to the war effort. Would they be willing to shoot a police officer? A less sceptical detective might have gone to the base's flag officer with half of the constabulary in Sussex and ordered a painstaking search. Such a man might very well have turned up nothing, wasted six months, countless man-hours and a hefty chunk of the police budget and made a damn fool of everyone involved. More importantly, the appearance of uniforms might very well have made his quarry vanish. From his hiding place behind a few barrels of diesel oil, Foyle was unable to spy any guards, nor his suspect, nor his real target. The man whom Foyle had trailed into this rats's nest of tunnels had entered the fuel dump some time before, causing him to lose precious minutes in finding a gas mask. (He ought to have carried his with him, of course, but the habit had worn off after the Blitz had ended.) All his suspect had to do was lie in wait behind the door, wait for Foyle to come through, then whip off his mask. The wheel in the centre of the door turned. A tall man in the blue double-breasted suit of a Royal Navy officer stepped through, pulled the door to without cycling the lock and sprawled onto the bottom of the stairs nearby. He removed his gas mask with a sigh of relief, revealing close-cropped blond hair. His eyes were closed in fatigue. Foyle memorised the man's face, slipped out from beneath the stairs and slid through the door.  


A large storehouse stretched before him. The ends of it vanished in a cloud of noxious fumes from the evaporating fuel. His clothes would stink for days—and be inflammable besides! Whistling caught his attention, a periodic oscillation between loud and soft. When the tune of 'Lili Marlene' faded into pianissimo, he slid from behind his barrels and walked calmly into the nearest alcove. All this sneaking around wasn't something which he had done since the Great War. Soon the guard's booted tread faded along with his poor musical abilities. Foyle headed down the row of looming fuel tanks to the far corner of the warehouse. He counted a dozen tall, gleaming tanks sunk into heavy concrete supports.  
"I'll report you, you know!"  
The English accent came from directly behind where Foyle was standing. He flattened himself behind the last tank in his row.  
"You're a damn thief Hedges! Stealing from another naval rating, that's an offence!"  
He slowly let out a breath. The gap between the concrete support and fuel tank provided a sliver of the scene. Two guards, both armed with Vickers machine pistols, stood facing one another. Undoubtedly, they were supposed to be patrolling their respective corridors.  
"What, am I going to be court-martialled for stealing your chocolate ration? Come on, I proposed! I couldn't afford a ring!"  
His accuser laughed. The stairs to the observation gantry lay directly behind him. So much for a perfect place to photograph the entire criminal ring. The camera might not function at all in this gloom. With their faces obscured by the gas masks, the pictures would only be of uniforms anyway. He shifted the bulky device beneath his arm, wishing that Milner were here instead of in Wales.  
"I might have…found you one…You should've asked, you fool!"  
The guards lapsed into silence. Foyle took the opportunity to listen for his quarry, but the man whom he had tracked to the warehouse must have found a hiding place as well. His civilian shoes would sound quite distinct from the heavy boots of the guards.  
"You mean…unofficially?" the thief ventured.  
"Don't look at me that way! Unlike you, I'm not a thief! People will swap a ring for a loaf of bread, the way the rationing is headed."  
"Well, I don't have a loaf of bread. Do you really think you'll be Petty Officer Benson one day—with that half of a brain?"  
Benson paused, shifting his grip on his Vickers.  
"A mate of mine can get you one: why stop at bread? Pair of silk stockings, bottle of champagne, anything your fiancée likes, really. Meet him this evening, he's a reasonable chap."  
Foyle held his breath. The men's voices were muffled by their gas masks. Sensing his friend's hesitation, the stranger continued:  
"The rations office at Brighton takes any surplus ration cards—"  
"—confiscated cards, you mean—" Hedges interrupted.  
The two laughed.  
"Hmm, from Miss Never Married But Somehow Has Two Children and so on...At any rate, one of their chaps _redistributes_ them to certain of us in the Royal Navy. All we do is pass them on. Sink a U-boat, double your meat ration, that sort of thing."  
So that was the story Fleming and his ilk had concocted. It fit nicely with the other statements his constables had collected, each one carefully tailored to appeal to the victims, all with the Robin Hood flavour of stealing from the wicked to give to the needy. Foyle wondered idly if Andrew and his RAF mates would be so easy to fool. No, surely they had more integrity than this lot.  
"Isn't it…well, not illegal exactly, but very risky?" asked Hedges.  
"Everyone from ordinary seamen to officers is involved. Who's going to tell on us when there are bigger fish to fry? It is odd, though…we've never met here before."  
"Well, you can leave me out of it! All I did was clock in because James was sick. Suppose he absorbed too many fumes, working all these shifts."  
Just as Foyle hoped his luck had come through, he saw a figure climb the stairs behind the two guards. Hedges spied the man too, for he raised his rifle to the firing position and shouted a challenge. The dark shape paused, halfway up to the gantry. Foyle used the distraction to move back the way he had come. There had to be another set of stairs. With luck he could collar the man red-handed.  


There was another set of stairs, accompanied by another pair of bored, under-paid young men who had doubtless imagined that signing up to His Majesty's Navy meant chasing down Hitler's grey wolves in the North Atlantic. Foyle shifted his gaze upwards. The observation gantry itself looked deserted, but with the angles it was difficult to be certain. Green lights winked in the gloom, probably the power box for this storehouse. A sudden hissing and crackling heralded a shower of sparks. Suddenly Foyle could barely see his hand in front of his face. The fuses in the lighting box above him had to have blown.  
"Halt or I shoot!" bellowed a voice.  
He heard the nearby guards sprint away from him. Neither of them was going to shoot blindly into a naval fuel depot, not if they wanted to survive. Foyle felt his way along the cold metal of the fuel storage. When he reached the end of his row, he struck out at a forty-five degree angle. His feet caught. Foyle lurched forwards, barking his shins on the edge of a step. Righting himself hastily, he ran upwards. Had his unknown suspect seen him after all, blowing the fuses to scramble out undetected? His footsteps rang on the metal, giving any nearby assailant ample warning. This was all far too clever for a few ration forgers. He stepped forward blindly, feeling his way along the handrail of the gantry. Next to the fuse box there would be a torch. Then Foyle would see which of them could run faster. There was only one door for this bunker! Mr. Too Clever By Half from the Brighton Ration Office had outsmarted himself neatly.  


In the darkness, the room tremored. An air raid? Surely not under twenty feet of solid concrete! Foyle tasted blood. Dizzy, he swayed to his knees. His gas mask was missing. Coughing, he ran his hands over the metal gangplank. Surely it had merely been dislodged when he had fallen. After wasting precious seconds, he staggered to his feet for a second time that night. He ran his palm against the concrete wall, willing himself to hit the fuse box soon. An ominous sucking-in of air reached his ears. Turning, an orange glow caught his eyes. Fire! His fingers slipped outwards into an alcove, touching cool metal. Another door. He grabbed the locking wheel, but the door slid open at his touch. He lurched through, blinking in the sudden light. Dark blotches swam in his vision. Coughing uncontrollably, he slammed the door shut. He blacked out still clinging to the locking wheel.


	2. Chapter 2

"Visiting Mr. Foyle is absolutely forbidden!"  
The Lieutenant blocking Sam's way looked more suited to a women's rugby team than a nursing station. She was louder than Sam, out-ranked Sam, had redder hair than Sam…and worst of all, she was Scottish. _Jock_ , she nick-named her.  
"Ma'am, I appreciate your concern for your patient, but Detective Chief Superintendent Foyle _ordered_ me to be here. I'm his driver, you see. He instructed me to wait for him, not to leave under any circumstances, so here I am. Waiting, as you can see."  
Sam's stomach rumbled.  
"Well, go an' wait outside the intensive care ward!"  
Sam clenched her hat in her fingers.  
"That's where I _was_ for the last four hours. Ma'am. Look, I just want to know whether Mr. Foyle is…is…that is, whether he'll…"  
She couldn't bring herself to finish. Had Milner been here instead of her, Mr. Foyle would never have told _him_ to wait by the car. Perhaps Mr. Foyle would never have been injured. Expertly, she turned her sniff into a cough. It didn't fool her enemy for a minute.  
"That sort o' driving, was it lass?"  
Sam stared. The W.R.N.'s expression had softened suspiciously. Blushing furiously, she inspected her toes.  
"Well,—" she started.  
Finishing this sentence was going to be even more difficult than the last!  
"Look, line up a few chairs outside and have a kip. I don't think your Mr. Foyle's going to die, but he certainly won't be conscious and ready to talk for a while yet. I'll let you know when I'm off duty, all right?"  
Nodding, Sam left. "Driving," was that what girls called it these days?  


"Sam!"  
Groggily, Sam opened her eyes. Milner was shaking her shoulder. She reached for a pillow with which to smack him, but felt only her folded-up jacket. Her neck hurt abominably and there was a button digging into her cheek. Then she remembered where she was.  
"Milner!"  
She shot to a sitting position on the hard, wooden chairs.  
"What time is it? Is Mr. Foyle awake yet?"  
She looked around wildly. There were a dozen cots draped in white sheets in the corridor. Her throat was dry. Her empty stomach churned.  
"None of those are yours, lass!"  
Jock stood by Milner's chair with a large cup of tea. The DS already had one. Sam sighed in relief. There was no saucer, but the hot tea warmed her stiff hands. Had she realised that these bunkers were so cold, she would have put on her driving gloves before going to sleep.  
"Who are they, then?"  
"Same accident, right here. You know the tunnels at the other end of H.M.S. Forward?"  
Sam nodded, sipping her tea. She had driven Mr. Foyle there last night, an underground den of anti-invasion bunkers, now filled with Women's Royal Naval Service doing God-knew-what to fight the convoy war.  
"Well there's a big fuel dump there for the destroyers and so on. Obviously they want it as far away from the hospital as possible, but it means an awful lot of tunnel between us and emergencies. Usually we just get gas inhalation: you know, someone's mask doesn't fit properly so they inhale the fuel vapours. But last night, your poor Mr. Foyle and about a dozen others got caught in a diesel explosion. Someone had a wee accident with a cigarette and blew everything to kingdom come! At least, that's what the red caps are saying."  
She broke off suddenly. Milner glanced up suspiciously from his tea. Sitting, he reached to about Jock's elbow. Sam followed her line-of-sight. Two men in khakis and crimson caps were escorting a third in immaculate police blues down the corridor to their right.  
"A.C. Rose," Milner whispered. "With the Royal Military Police, speak of the devil!"  
_We're not here!_ Sam thought of whispering to her new-found ally, but she was already down the corridor.  
"Absolutely _no_ visiting! This is an intensive care ward, not the London Zoo! How am I supposed to treat patients if you lot barge in here every five minutes?"  
Rose untucked his cap from his arm, holding it between him and the nurse like a shield.  
"Madam, I am the Assistant Commissioner for—" Sam heard the assistant commissioner begin.  
" _I_ am the First Officer responsible for this ward and I am tired of dismissing civilians from my intensive care unit! Your lot aren't even supposed to know that this base exists!"  
Rose's cheek twitched, Sam could see it even from six feet away.  
"Aye, I had some civvies in here an hour ago. You get the same response, _Mister_ Assistant Commissioner. Sod off!"  
Sensing defeat, A.C. Rose and his two R.M.P. cronies made a tactical withdrawal in the direction whence they had come.  
"Who let him in here?" Milner whispered, as if his words would carry to Rose like an air-raid siren. "I had to talk my way in with my Terriers' ID and an old contact."  
Sam nodded, hearing the real question: how did Rose know that Mr. Foyle was even hurt, let alone where?  
"Isn't a Territorial Army clearance about as much use as a bus pass in the Royal Navy?" she whispered back.  
Her musings were interrupted by the return of Sam's new favourite Wren.  
"I thought the military police were supposed to keep their mouths shut," Milner commented.  
"Aye, officially. A couple of them came in with minor burns and a bad case of shock, so we started talking. It's good for them, letting everything out instead of leaving it to fester."  
She leaned in conspiratorially.  
"Can you believe that some of these lads have never seen a body?"  
Milner's teacup paused halfway between lips and chair.  
"With all due respect, there are corpses and then there are pieces of them."  
He carefully set the metal cup on the chair next to Sam.  
"A man fallen to enemy fire looks very different to what's left of them when their mate steps on a mine. The burned ones are even worse."  
He fell silent. Jock inspected him curiously. Finally she said:  
"Spook Division?"  
Milner shook his head.  
"Trondheim. Norway, not France. I've never seen a German tank, much less a division of them."  
"Well, neither have I. Let's hope it stays that way!"  
Sam laughed. Even Milner smiled, doubtless recalling how everyone had been wound up over the risk of invasion last summer. Having drained her tea, Sam fiddled with the tin cup. Eventually D.S. Milner retrieved his hat from the back of his chair.  
"You wouldn't drop me off at the station, would you Sam? The Wrens will ring if Mr. Foyle's condition changes."  
Despite all the assurances she and Milner had received, Sam wasn't certain that all the danger was over.  


Milner didn't head for his office. Instead he walked into Mr. Foyle's, shut the door and locked it. Then he started going through Mr. Foyle's drawers.  
"Isn't this rather irregular, sir?"  
"Everything about this is irregular," he sighed. "Where are his case notes? I want to at least look at them before Rose gets his greasy hands on them."  
He slammed the lowest drawer shut, then pivoted in the direction of the filing cabinet. The telephone rang. Sam reached for the receiver, but Milner put a finger to his lips. Frowning, she let it ring out. Milner grabbed her sleeve, nodding towards the door. The pair of them slipped out, Milner locking the door on the way past, then tiptoed into Milner's office with a maximum of quiet and a minimum of dignity. Milner slumped in his usual chair, while Sam leaned on one of the filing cabinets.  
"One of my mates was wounded in action in Norway. Poor chap spent a month in bed with gastroenteritis. Can you believe it Sam? He survives the Stukas and nearly gets killed by his own bully beef ration!"  
While talking, he bent to extract pen and paper from his desk. He was determined to copy Mr. Foyle's case notes and give them to some stranger! Surely he wouldn't be this determined at rule-breaking if it had been just Sam Stewart in that hospital bed, instead of Christopher Foyle?  
"Typical Charlie, he spent it reading. When he was discharged he knew the dreaded Field Service Regulations off by heart; not to mention that he lost most of his appendix and all of his sense of humour. Guess where he is now?"  
"Well, where does one put anyone in the military without a sense of humour? Red caps or blob spotters?" she joked.  
Milner grinned.  
"Luckily for us, not staring at green blobs on an ADSIC set. He's an officer in the Royal Military Police."  
Sam squashed her misgivings. It was risky, especially right under the Commissioner's nose, but surely she would go to the same lengths for Mr. Foyle?  
"Does he drink at the Wheatsheaf, the King's Head or the Red Lion? Please not the Wheatsheaf," she groaned.  
"Let's find out this evening, shall we?"  
"Fine, sir." Sam said, "Provided there's nothing stronger than warm beer."  
"Done and done."  
They were interrupted by a knock on the door.  
"Constable Rivers earning his pay," the D.S. sighed.  
Sam peeked out the door. A.C. Rose was marching down the hallway, moustache quivering in rage. Grinning, she led the way back into Mr. Foyle's office. There, the two of them started on the real work of deciphering Mr. Foyle's filing system. By this evening, they needed something suspicious to show to this 'Charlie' friend of Milner's.  


The Hope and Anchor pub was a small establishment in the twisted back-streets of Rye. By this time, Sam was swaying slightly, half-pints of bitter notwithstanding.  
"How are we going to get back sir?" she mumbled. "I'm not driving!"  
The pair of them headed down the hill arm-in arm. Milner wasn't too steady on the cobbles with his aluminium foot, especially when the street was this steep. It was the foot which was making him lean a little too close, with the two of them touching from wrist to shoulder. Definitely not the beer.  
"Don't know, Sam. Charlie ought to have given us a better description than 'charming old pub down the hill' shouldn't he!"  
Opening the door, the odours of pipe tobacco, stale lager and unwashed men assaulted her nose.  
"Buy you a drink, pretty?" someone called as they walked in.  
"Another time?" Sam caroled.  
There was general laughter. The shout had evidently come from the end of the bar, where a man in khaki had two petty officers draped over his shoulders.  
"Not you miss!"  
The offender winked flirtatiously all the same. Milner's face had become the same colour as a pomegranate. The penny dropped. Hastily, Sam dragged the DS over to the bar. Neither of them had to ask for a drink. The alcohol ration was down to one lager, only in half-pints. Pork scratchings were a half-ration card a packet.  
"Sixpence ha'penny please," said the barman.  
"I thought Prince Charming was buying," Milner countered.  
"On the tab, George?"  
The man in question had somehow disentangled himself from his non-commissioned officers. George nodded, rang the till and scuttled off to serve someone less questionable.  
"Should've seen your face, Corporal!" their accoster chuckled.  
"Outside, Lieutenant?"  
The three of them fought their way back through the crowd into the summer air. The moon was full, providing the only light with the blackout still in force. Their new friend wiped his hands briskly on his khakis and held the right out. Sam shook it.  
"Charles Mitchell, formerly Lieutenant with the British 146th Infantry."  
"Sam Stewart, Motor Transport Corps."  
They both picked up their warm beer from the cobbles.  
"Have you and D.S. Milner known each other long?"  
Mitchell nodded.  
"Paul Milner here was one of my non-coms. Evidently I stole his next posting," he joked.  
"Yes, your last letter mentioned that you were 1st Military Police Brigade," Milner said.  
"Haven't I written in a year? Bloody Hell! I made it to Captain a month ago. Green caps, too: the S.I.B."  
"Congratulations!"  
A smile tugged at the corners of Milner's mouth.  
"The green must play havoc with your lovely ginger hair," he teased.  
"Quite," Mitchell grinned, batting his eyelashes, "Better than scarlet, though—and it does match my eyes."  
Feeling like a spare tyre, Sam took a gulp of lager.  
"Special Investigation Branch," Milner offered. "They get flashy green cap covers, instead of the scarlet ones like normal Provosts. I suppose it's the equivalent of being detective instead of uniformed."  
She nodded in thanks. Sometimes it felt as though the military types spoke in German rather than English.  
"Are you working on anything now?" she asked. "I mean, anything you can discuss."  
"Like that Chief Super who happens to be in the hospital at the not-so-secret tunnels under Newhaven?"  
He grinned again at Milner.  
"I would love to report to my C.O. that we and the local forces are working hand-in-glove. There's a price, though…"  
"Provided it isn't Milner in a dress, I think we'd be happy to pay it," Sam said.  
Even in the darkness, Sam fancied that she saw Milner's cheeks redden.  


Back at the Mermaid Inn, Captain Mitchell's room looked as if half the Luftwaffe had been at it. Papers and photographs lay in disarray, carpeting the floor far better than the rug in front of the fireplace. As the lamps warmed up, Milner's friend hung their coats and hats. The officer reached under the bed and dragged out a heavy case. Unlocking it was rendered a considerable task by the amount of lager he had obviously consumed. Eventually, Mitchell produced a half-inch thick manila file tied with string and tossed it on the bed.  
"Help yourselves," he nodded.  
"Are those all fakes on the floor?" asked Milner.  
The bedsprings creaked as he sat. Sam plopped herself down on the doona, while Mitchell sat opposite Milner.  
"Absolutely! Everyone's called Tommy Atkins, what do you expect?"  
"Somehow, I don't imagine any Jerries will get the joke," Sam commented.  
"Can you imagine Heydrich's face, though?"  
At Sam's blank face, he continued:  
"Bastard's head of the S.D., the version of the S.I.B. over the hill. Nasty chap."  
Milner nodded absently, already halfway through laying out photographs. Here was a twisted, blackened section of gantry; there a concrete staircase covered in soot, with a door hanging from its hinges; over the pillow lay a crater with metal tanks scattered on top of one another like a fistful of ammunition. On the sheet lay a neat stack of bodies, mostly numbered.  
"How many?" she managed.  
"Fourteen dead, two severely wounded. Eleven fatalities at the scene, three died of injuries this morning. The survivors are critical but stable, the last I heard."  
Sam tore her eyes from the corpses to watch Milner's brow furrow. Mitchell's mouth was the width of a pencil.  
"Isn't that rather a lot?" the D.S. asked.  
"Top marks, Milner. There are supposed to be four guards, one for each column. Foyle makes five—"  
"—Don't forget the suspect Mr. Foyle was tailing," Sam interrupted. "And the real catch, whomever was in charge—"  
She stopped, looking at the finger Milner held to his lips.  
"—so eleven, no, nine left," Mitchell continued.  
He too stopped abruptly.  
"But we have ten dental records from R.N. files," he finished.  
Milner was still watching Sam.  
"Oh! So an inside job," she exclaimed.  
"Top marks to you too, Sam Stewart!" said the M.P.  
"So who were the last people there? Isn't there some kind of safety control?"  
Milner's brown hair bobbed up and down from behind a police file.  
"It's worth checking whether our suspect lit the fuse and walked off," he commented. "If there is a suspect."  
Mitchell's pale green stare fixed on Sam.  
"Not an accident, then?"  
She nodded.  
"Bit of a bugger, that," he mused. "How am I going to convince my superior of that with two very unconscious witnesses?"  
Milner's head finally emerged from behind his file. He scowled.  
"My superior and his tailed suspect. Foyle was already obsessing over this case, surely he can't get any worse."  
Mitchell yawned, rising from the bed.  
"Let's hope that H.M.S. Forward doesn't have visiting hours."  
Both Sam and Milner laughed.  
"We'll tell you in the car," Sam offered, "since you're driving."  



	3. Chapter 3

"Whom are we seeing?" Sam asked.  
Milner glanced at the scenery outside.  
"This officer whom Foyle recognised."  
He was careful to keep his voice level. An outside chance, spoken by a man who had woken from unconsciousness after more than a day, still addled with shock and troubled by his lungs. A hunch, even. Could he really have recognised one face from dozens of personnel files? Sam was still quiet, as if not speaking about her scepticism might make it vanish.  
"Even Charlie thought it was strange. Commander Neil Auchinleck has a perfect record—"  
"—In the Royal Colliding Navy, sir."  
That brought a faint smile to his lips.  
"Do try to avoid calling the Canadians that to their faces, Sam."  
"Oh? I thought I was staying with the car, sir!"  
Milner determinedly examined the hedgerows outside, to delay looking at the bright smile on Sam's face. It seemed so out of place. The looming thickets of twisted hedge frowned at him with Foyle's scowling, wan pallor from the night before. It had been his own fault, after all, running off to Wales after his wife. Milner had tried to voice his concern with his superior, but Foyle would only tell him not to be such a fool. Every file the man had examined had made him more stubbornly insistent that he would return to work within the week…  
"Ashford House, look there's the boom gate."  
Sam pointed with a gloved finger, removing her hand from the wheel. He sighed in relief. No matter how find he was of Sam personally, her country driving was more suited to a tank than a staff car.  
"Friendly chaps, aren't they?" Sam remarked.  
She slowed the car on the bitumen, turning on the gravel with a crunch. A guard-post, striped in warning, held a telephone and a tired-looking non-commissioned officer. Two men stood at either side of the boom gate, both of them manning a Bren gun. Milner fished in his breast pocket for his identity card and the letter of introduction.  
"Morning sir! No entry here. Continue down the B-road please."  
A fourth guard had approached the driver's side window. Milner squinted enough to see another machine pistol, before the sun overcame him. A sharp tactic, he considered, dutifully handing over his documents. The glare of the morning sunlight made the wait seem like an age.  
"Leave the car here, sir."  
Milner extracted himself from the cramped passenger seat. With longer legs than Foyle, perhaps he would have to get around to moving it after all.  
"After me, Corporal."  
"Your driver can stay by the car, sir."  
Catching Sam Stewart's outraged expression, he raised an eyebrow at her before limping off.  


CDR. CLAUDE RITCHIE read the paper slip on the door.  
"Damn it, the Wrens are playing jokes again!" the guard grumbled.  
His escort removed the CDR. NEIL AUCHINLECK name-card on the door opposite for the slip from—presumably—Auchinleck's office. The door swung open before he could exchange them.  
"No, we really have swapped!"  
A brunet some four inches shorter than Milner stood on the threshold. His accent sounded American, at odds with his Royal Navy duty uniform. Not that Milner had ever seen a Canadian in the flesh before, but Sam had tried to drag him off to see Clark Gable last week. Surely they couldn't be so different?  
"Though you can swap us back if you like. I'd much rather be in there."  
He nodded towards the other office.  
"But no, the smug bastard now has the office with the window. I, on the other hand, have a lovely view of the ceiling rose."  
"I'm supposed to deliver Milner to your colleague, Commander," intoned the guard.  
Ritchie shrugged, moving aside from the doorway.  
"Wait in here, he's out. Interviews."  
Milner moved into the office. The walls were Victorian-country-house issue pastel, with cream cornices highlighted in slightly-peeling gold leaf. A sofa faced an unlighted fireplace with a vase of flowers in the grate. Milner sat in the chair before the desk instead, hoping to capture more attention than the half-drunk tea which lay abandoned on the table between sofa and fireplace. He glanced over the papers, rapidly discovering that his reading-upside-down skills were limited to typed correspondence.  
"Do make yourself at home."  
Ritchie looked askance at the mess on his desk. He hastily started transferring the most disarranged papers into the drawers.  
"Coffee?" he continued.  
"Why not?" Milner acquiesced. "It isn't rationed, after all."  
He took the hint and limped over to the sofa while Ritchie rang the bell. There was a real butler's bell, as if he had walked into the last century! The Commander brushed imaginary lint from his naval blues before sitting.  
"Sorry about the mess! I lost a bet, you see, and my idiot colleague hasn't cleared out all of his stuff."  
"What was the wager?" he probed.  
"Oh, classified."  
Ritchie drummed his fingers against the arm of the sofa. Milner waited for him to fill the silence.  
"Well, I suppose I can tell you the bones of it…"  
Here was a man not unaccustomed to the sound of his own voice, Milner considered. His triumph was short-lived.  
"But you first! You're a cop, right? Has something happened to the Auk?"  
"Should it?"  
Commander Ritchie shrugged.  
"He's been gone a couple of days. You expected to find him here, so obviously he isn't hurt, at least not badly. He's not in trouble, neither, or the red caps would've come instead of a civilian Bobby. Maybe I can help you with your follow-up enquiries? Thanks darling," he added.  
This last was directed at a Wren with the coffee tray. She nodded, not blushing a whit, before retreating. Milner didn't blink.  
"See, Hastings is rather a long way from here…you sure some local knowledge wouldn't be helpful?"  
The dark eyes danced at him while Ritchie plunged the coffee. Milner held his tongue with an effort of will.  
"Local knowledge of Auchinleck would be very useful," he said calmly. "If you'll excuse me, I'll be off to find someone who can help with that."  
"You'll be lucky," Ritchie countered. "I've never met a man with fewer friends."  
"Difficult to meet oneself, isn't it?"  
Milner tore his eyes from the mockery in Ritchie's. A second officer stood in the doorway: another flawlessly-ironed, navy blue suit, gold buttons polished to a mirror sheen; the right-hand starched cuff hid a silver-cased watch with red crown; black shoes, scuff-free and in fine leather with slightly uneven stitching. Milner could almost smell the old money over the scent of Kölnischwasser 4711.  
"Commander Auchinleck, I presume?"  
He nodded, eyes flicking to Ritchie.  
"Mind if I clean your office, old chap? You might pour the coffee and introduce your friend in the meantime."  
"Milner, D.S. with Hastings Constabulary," he introduced himself. "Perhaps we can talk in private?"  
He pointedly ignored Ritchie's smirk of triumph. Milner moved to the safe no-man's-land of the desk, halfway between sofa and doorway.  
"Is my colleague in some sort of trouble?" the new arrival asked. "I do hope that you will delay arresting him until he carries my files for me."  
"You're in trouble, Auk—and you can carry your own bloody boxes!"  
Taking him at his word, Auchinleck pulled all the drawers from the desk and stacked them neatly on top. He gave four to Milner and picked up the other stack.  
"Hey! When did I say that you could have all my files? Kretschmer is mine! We had a deal, remember? You get Schepke, I get Kretschmer, the R.N. gets the lesser aces. Or have you forgotten we're all on the same side?"  
Auchinleck merely raised an eyebrow at the outburst.  
"I imagined that the files went with the office."  
"Right, you want me to give you silent Otto for free, huh?" Ritchie snorted.  
"His Majesty's best-looking officer more your type, is he?"  
"So that's how you make him talk?" his opponent fired back. "I suppose all you Old Etonians…what's the phrase…bat for the other team? Must come from growing up in boarding school with the nearest girls locked in Windsor Castle."  
Milner slammed his teetering pile of oak drawers back on the desk. He would pay for any damage later.  
"If only Dönitz could see you two now!" he snapped.  
Much to his surprise, Auchinleck followed his example, albeit less forcefully.  
"Fine," he said, with the carefully even tone of someone trying and failing to rein in their temper. "Shall we _share_ Schepke and permit the D.S. to fill us in on the way?"  
Ritchie looked as if he had swallowed a bar of coal tar soap. He nodded all the same.  
"Deal. If we get in trouble for bringing a civilian into the prisoner of war camp, this was all your idea."  
"Excellent. Pour the coffee while we wait for the driver."  
Forestalling another argument, Milner crossed to the sofa and poured instead. He was just looking for a third cup when the previous Wren supplied one. This time Ritchie suppressed any flirtatious remarks, he noted.  


"You were going to tell me about a bet," he began.  
Interviewing Auchinleck was definitely a task to delay until they were alone. The officer had dragged the chair over from the desk and sat facing himself and Ritchie. Milner sipped experimentally, burning his tongue.  
"That bet," Auchinleck nodded. "We had a little contest about which of us…no, let me start from the beginning. You're not R.N. are you?"  
Milner shook his head, avoiding the other's gaze very slightly. It was unsettling to see grey eyes that dark, even more so against the blond hair. It was an advantage which Milner wanted Auchinleck to assume he still had.  
"Well, good," joked Ritchie. "This is where it all started, you see. There's a turf war between the Canadians and good old Britannia. Ever since RADAR came into operation on our boats—we've had them on land for ages, but couldn't fit the centimetric transmitters on a warship—we've been sinking U-boats right, left and centre."  
RItchie broke off, but Auchinleck declined to continue the tale.  
"Most of them are taken as prisoners of war to Canada. It's _big_ , you see. You Brits just don't get it: all of Germany could fit into Quebec alone! Who wants to escape into that wilderness? Even if they do survive and stow away and cross the Atlantic, they'll just be sent out to die again! It's rescue-proof."  
He slumped against the sofa, drinking his coffee. This time Auchinleck did take the hint.  
"All the more reason that the Royal Navy's doctrine is madness! Some of the prisoners stay here in England for…processing…shall we say. The aces, Hitler's grey wolves, they call themselves."  
Auchinleck had a soft voice and Milner found himself leaning forward to hear properly. He caught himself in time. Just his luck, for Ritchie's American—no, Canadian, he reminded himself—twang hit his right ear instead.  
"All Karl Dönitz has to do is slip a few Abwehr guys into the P.O.W. compounds and start them digging tunnels. He doesn't even have to pick them up, some of these guys can swim the Channel, the way they keep fit!"  
Ritchie paused for a sip of coffee.  
"Anyway," he continued, "The long story short is that we're out to prove that we can hold our own with these guys. If it works, we don't need to run the risk of shipping the next Prien or Schepke or Kretschmer to London: we'll send them straight to somewhere very cold, very westerly and very miserable!"  
"You mentioned these names before," Milner commented. "The 'Bull of Scapa Flow,' isn't that Prien?"  
Auchinleck nodded.  
"Embarrassing, that was! You call _us_ the Royal Colliding Navy, but no U-boat has managed to sneak into our principal naval base and torpedo destroyers at will!"  
The man couldn't restrain himself from a smile.  
"The entire Scapa Flow debacle made him a national hero, as one might imagine. Prien became fast friends with two others, Otto Kretschmer and Joachim Schepke. The three of them were inseparable—until Prien's boat went missing in March, nearly five months ago to the day. The other two were captured at the end of the same month."  
"Auchinleck and I transferred over here to get more information out of them than our English colleagues could, at a faster rate. We decided to split up, make one of the them talk to one of us—and only us. Whoever cracked one first got the best office."  
Milner glanced at both of them.  
"You started in March, it's now August. Not going well, is it?"  
Neither of them seemed perturbed by the admission. None of this explained why Auchinleck had been in the tunnels under Newhaven rather than in the luxurious Ashford House, or even at the P.O.W. camp. Even if the trip had been legitimate, were the long hours getting to the Commander, making him careless; or was the accident really an attempt to vent frustration gone horribly wrong? The suspect drained his coffee and stood. So did his irritating colleague.  
"Next move: we tell the darlings of the Kriegsmarine that their best friend is dead. That'll get a rise out of even silent Otto!"  
Milner resolved to tag along, whether an invited guest or not. Sam would just love the chance to tail the Royal Navy's intelligence service.  


Sam was A.W.O.L. Milner sighed. So were the car keys. At least she wasn't hiding the jump leads in the nearest biscuit tin anymore! It was some small comfort that if he looked such a dunce in front of his chief suspect, perhaps he wouldn't consider Milner to be a threat.  
"They're telephoning the outhouses now," Ritchie remarked. "Fat lot of good that will do."  
"Isn't that odd?" Milner asked. "Do they run the line all the way from the main house?"  
"I suppose so," the younger man said. "Look, just use our car. I don't know what his problem is!"  
He inclidned his head in the direction of the guard post. Just as Auchinleck had reached them, the telephone rang.  
"Speak of the devil," Milner remarked.  
He limped for the telephone before either of them could stop him. It was Sam, not that she wanted anyone else to know that, with a new-found friend and some tangentially-useful gossip. After about the length of time it would take to assure someone that his driver was totally absent, Milner hung up the telephone and returned to the two officers.  
"No luck, I'm afraid. At least you can tell me all about the exciting line of work here."  
"Mind if I travel in the front?" enquired Ritchie. "I do loathe Auchinleck's fondness for smoking. It's a filthy habit."  
"Almost as filthy as you," the other man remarked.  


Paul Milner was not a man prone to self-congratulation. Now he recalled why. He had thought himself so clever, pretending that Sam was missing so that he could observe their only suspect under pressure and obtain anything that might lead to a motive. He had been standing on the soggy grass, outside a Nissan hut crammed with his chief suspect, his chief suspect's worst enemy, two very surly guardsmen and a German war hero. Milner wasn't sure how long he had been here, for he had forgotten to wind his watch earlier, but it had been long enough that the skies had clouded over, soaked him in a half-hearted drizzle until he was wet down to his bones, then cleared again. He had even run out of worrying hypotheses of what might be happening to Mr. Foyle. His misery was interrupted when Ritchie exploded from the makeshift hut.  
"Bastard! He said next to nothing, then dismissed me with a wink and a smirked 'Good boy!' Winked! Now he wants to smoke my tobacco ration! Prisoners don't do that sort of thing, swords or no swords!"  
_Swords?_ Milner frowned. Auchinleck caught the door before it slammed. Milner was certain that his lips twitched.  
"Flirting with the local women not enough for you, Commander? Starting on the men too?" he asked mildly.  
Ritchie's mouth opened, wisely shut again, then he stalked off. The grin on Auchinleck's face broadened. He turned to Milner.  
"Short temper, that one. I have to catch up with him before he barges into Monty's office and vents at our C.O. I hope that you have everything you need, Detective?"  
"Actually," he shrugged, "Now that you mention it, I wouldn't mind a light."  
The officer frowned.  
"I have reports to deliver to my commanding officer. I'm afraid I don't have time to stand around watching you smoke."  
Milner nodded.  
"Of course. It can wait until we get back to the manor. I've finished my enquiries here and I'm sure it doesn't take long to drop off a report."  
He suppressed a smile of triumph as the officer reached into his pocket for a crumpled cigarette packet and a lighter.  
"I suppose I had better keep you happy, being your chief suspect. It's a verbal report, so I won't be more than half an hour."  
"I'll be waiting outside," Milner called to his retreating back.  


When the coast was clear, Milner walked into the makeshift interview room. He flashed his old infantry I.D. at the two guards, curtly demanded that they salute their superior officer, then ushered them from the hut. He sat, heart hammering. All he could see of the prisoner was an unkempt crown of blond hair, several shades darker than Auchinleck's, with all the subtlety of the rising sun. Auchinleck's damned lighter didn't want to co-operate. What was the problem with a box of matches?  
"Don't smoke, do you?" the prisoner commented. "Neither do I, but it stops the itching."  
"Pardon?"  
"My kneecaps itch when I have been sitting for a long time. The cigarette is a distraction, lest I reach out to scratch and—and find that there's nothing there."  
He kept his face propped on curled fingers. The man raised his eyes from the worn table for the first time. For one idiotic moment, all Milner could think was that he had solved the "swords" mystery: a black medal hung about the man's throat, crowned by oak-leaves and crossed swords.  
"The English equivalent is the Victoria Cross, I think. With two bars?"  
"Was it worth the knees?" Milner retorted.  
All he received in return was a smile. Every interview must have started that way, or else the prisoner wouldn't look so damned confident. Milner batted away the self-doubt. Foyle would have known what to say to prise him open. Milner had no professional training like the intelligence officers. Interviewing was just a skill every constable picked up on the job, starting from the first utterance of the immortal "Hello, hello, what's going on here then?" If he couldn't wait him out, that left only one solution…  
"My toes were the worst," Milner admitted. "I'd wake up, dreaming that I had two feet, and then—"  
He swallowed.  
"My name is Milner. I'm a policeman, Detective Sergeant with the Hastings constabulary."  
The prisoner shook his hand warily.  
"Schepke, _Kapitänleuntnant_. I used to captain U-100, before a destroyer ran over her—and me!"  
The detective handed over the lighter and the brown paper packet. After a minute or so, a small wisp of smoke issued from the cigarette. A shockingly comfortable pause followed. Milner shook himself mentally.  
"A policeman?"  
The prisoner hesitated.  
"A sort of English Gestapo?" he ventured cautiously.  
"No, no, nothing like that! I'm investigating one of the men who interrogated you. He caused an accident which nearly killed my superior. It was an attempt to hide various types of fraud, black marketeering, treason…"  
Milner watched his right hand move to the edge of the table, but the captain caught himself and picked up the cigarette instead.  
"Perhaps you might explain why I am helpful?"  
Milner fought to keep a frown from his face. At the man was willing to co-operate. He didn't know what he would have done had the German just refused to talk, or worse, demanded either of the Canadians back again. Inspiration had struck, so he had acted.  
"Did he speak to you about anything unusual? Offer anything to make your life easier? Perhaps agreed to send messages to your family for some hefty fee?"  
Just as Foyle instructed, he set the bait and waited for the fish to bite.  
"Commander Ritchie has done a lot to make my life more difficult, not less!"  
Ritchie? The cigarette sketched aimless patterns in the air.  
"He's especially fond of making me stand to attention. We have a roll-call three times a day. For security, you know, so we only have eight hours head start in an escape. Usually Otto carries me out, but that intelligence bastard orders me to wobble out on wooden legs like some fucking pirate and stand until I fall over! At the least, winding him up like a pocket watch is easy and a great deal more satisfying."  
"What about Auchinleck?"  
The captain shrugged.  
"They usually came separately. Now they are both present at the same time."  
"Both of them?"  
Milner found himself on the receiving end of a glare that probably sank ships all by itself. He changed tack to something less obvious. Sam had given him a name.  
"Do you know a man named Ernst Tiemann?"  
"I did," he replied evenly. "He's dead. Why do you want to know about a dead seaman?"  
Suspicion crinkled the corners of Schepke's eyes.  
"Are you sure?"  
" _Matrose_ Tiemann was on duty in the engine room when U-100 sank. Five men survived by jumping overboard before the collision. As you might imagine, he was not amongst them."  
"Perhaps you didn't notice in all the confusion?" Milner suggested.  
The prisoner uttered a short laugh.  
"Perhaps I didn't notice killing thirty-seven of my own men?"  
He stabbed the cigarette out on the table. Somehow the ash smelled of the bomb cordite of Norway.  
"I was jammed behind the periscope mast when my ship sank. The swell rolled the ship over, then spat me into the water not a hundred yards from U-99. Had Otto not jumped overboard to save me, I would have died too."  
"That's the second time you mentioned this Otto," probed Milner.  
"Otto Kretschmer, Commander of U-99. 'Silent Otto' you English call him. The two of us and another ace, Gunther Prien, had a bet when the war started to see who would set a new tonnage record."  
He exhaled.  
"Can you imagine? We had some fancy notion that all three of us would be the next Lothar von Arnauld de la Perière, or die trying!"  
He broke off suddenly. Milner nodded in only half-feigned sympathy.  
"I was green as summer grass before shipping to Norway," he offered. "My wife thinks I'm a changed man. But what sort of monster wouldn't be changed by war?"  
The pair sat in silence. Milner was acutely aware of his shortage of time. Schepke fished in his pocket. To Milner's surprise, he drew out a small chess piece.  
"Commander Auchinleck handed this over. There was a letter, but he wouldn't let me read it."  
The black king spun round and round in his long fingers.  
"It doesn't matter really, I know Frau Prien's handwriting. We'd give the piece on shore leave to whichever of us was the reigning tonnage king. Now one of us really has died trying."  
Schepke lapsed into silence. Milner rose from the table.  
"Thank you for your time, Lieutenant-Commander."  
The prisoner inclined his head. Milner limped to the door.  
"How is your wife, Detective Sergeant?"  
He turned abruptly. The captain gestured.  
"In Germany, the ring is worn on the other hand. But perhaps you're widowed, or divorced…"  
Milner glanced at the thin band of gold on his finger. He hadn't removed it even in the hospital. And now, now…  
"We manage," he assured the man. "Not without difficulty, but everything worked out for the best."  
"You're a terrible liar! And you only lost an ankle!" Schepke grinned.  
Milner shut the door with considerably more force than necessary. Those pale blue eyes mocked him all the way across the wet grass and back across both fences of the P.O.W. compound.  


A horn blare jerked Milner from his reverie. He blinked as Sam leaned out the car window.  
"Penny for your thoughts?" Sam asked brightly.  
He climbed into the passenger seat.  
"Surely mine are worth at least sixpence," he countered.  
He fumbled for the seat belt. Foyle would take a dim view of his D.S. slowing the case even more by ending up in the local hospital. Sam braked at the boom gate, collected both their identity cards and drove on. Her fingers tapped impatiently against the wheel, in a familiar gesture that indicated that Paul Milner was not about to get away with morbid self-pity.  
"I…I was just thinking about Foyle, really. What if he hadn't given me that chance, what if he hadn't piqued my interest with that first case file, reminded me that I did like policing before the war, and that I was good at it, and that I could still be good at it, foot or no foot—"  
"What you really mean, is that you wanted everything to go back to the way that it was before."  
He nodded, acutely aware of his rambling.  
"How could I have convinced Jane that it was true? I didn't believe it myself!"  
The elephant in the room was that Jane was still in Wales, with her family. A strategic retreat, he might have termed it, once. Milner lapsed into silence again. A passing cyclist suffered the full volume of the car's horn. Sam swerved around him and resumed tailgating the official navy car.  
"What brought this on?" Sam probed.  
"I wrangled the chance to talk to the prisoner our suspect interrogated—totally illegal, of course, I'm just a civilian—and he's not escaping anywhere."  
Milner took a deep breath, glad to be rid of the damnable navy intrigue for a short while.  
"He lost both his legs. Even if he does escape, he can't go back to sea anymore."  
Sam digested this in silence for a blessed ten seconds.  
"So you two are in the same boat?"  
Milner groaned.  
"How long before we get back to Hastings, Sam?"  
"If you suffer my jokes, or walk? Mr. Foyle never lets me tell any!"  



	4. Chapter 4

Stay with the car. It was always the same bloody phrase! Sam considered kicking the tyres, but she would only hurt her toes and ruin her boots besides.  
"Oh, hello! I didn't realise Daddy was sending me a nanny as well as a driver!"  
A young woman, surely no older than Sam herself, was marching down the driveway in riding gear. Wisps of blonde hair were steadily escaping her ponytail, she wore gentlemen's sunglasses and riding boots spattered with mud.  
"Elizabeth Fairbanks! Call me Fat Lizzie, everyone else does."  
"Really?" said Sam, cursing the word the minute it had escaped her mouth.  
"Well, unless you're after my inheritance—in which case I suddenly become more beautiful than Venus and all her cupids!"  
Fat Lizzie—short, cheerful, careless Lizzie—held out her hand. She had neglected to remove her riding gloves.  
"Sam. Sam Stewart, Motor Transport Corps. I wasn't sent by anyone, I'm afraid. I'm driving Mr. Foyle—well, one of the local policemen."  
"Does that really count as helping the war effort?" Lizzie asked.  
Sam fought to keep her voice from rising.  
"Yes."  
"How marvellous! If only I knew how to drive, I would be able to help too!"  
The other woman hefted a wicker basket and stomped in the direction of the boot.  
"Our butler has been shipped off to North Africa, so all I can do for the war effort is the shopping."  
Sam bit viciously on the inside of her cheek to prevent a fit of the giggles.  
"Look, I'm sorry, I think there's been a misunderstanding. You see, I have to wait for Detective Chief, I mean Detective Sergeant—"  
"Well, he can hardly be a decent superior if you cannot even recall his rank! And one doesn't have to do anything, darling, one only _ought_ to do things. It's about the only perk of being a woman."  
Sam shifted for one foot to the other. It was that or wait here for God-knew how long… Sam fished in her pocket for the boot key.  


Lizzie was halfway through another vicar joke when they returned to Ashford House. The young lady had told as many jokes about aristocrats, so Sam supposed that the two of them were even.  
"I'm supposed to be throwing a picnic for our staff. Lunchtime tomorrow: might you be able to come?"  
They waited for the boom gate, but this time Lizzie gave Sam instructions along the drive to the tradesmen's entrance. She was quietly relieved at not having to heft all of the packages any further than necessary. It made her wonder how much she would have to help Mr. and Mrs. Jack Archer when they walked down the aisle.  
"Even if Milner can't contrive to be here, I can always drive up by myself," she offered.  
Had Milner had the choice, Sam suspected that he would spend morning, noon and night fussing over Mr. Foyle. Fortunately for the rest of Hastings's police force, the only help the man would take was the pair of them solving this case!  
"Splendid!"  
The pair of them began lifting boxes from the boot.  
"Can you take the eggs?" Sam asked. "I'll only drop them!"  
Her new friend laughed.  
"Did you see the butcher's face when I required two dozen eggs? He nearly died, having to use up the allotment for his regular customers."  
"I hope we don't die eating them! What if they came from some black market stash and are three weeks old?" Sam ventured.  
"More likely that the bacon did, or the fish!"  
Sam had never had twenty-four ration coupons to hand over, let alone on one purchase. That wasn't even counting the money! Those scallops would make even National Loaf taste good, or at least unlike cardboard.  
" _Gnädige Fräulein!_ " called a voice from about six feet above her.  
Sam righted herself from her stoop over the crate full of ice. Her cheeks reddened as she caught herself staring.  
"Hello! I'm Sam," she said brightly, carefully avoiding the word _Corporal_.  
"Good afternoon, _Fräulein_ Sam," the stranger enunciated carefully. "Can I help you?"  
"What? Oh—" and she stepped out of the way mutely.  
The polite young man nodded in return, picked up the crate and walked inside. Sam found herself still staring at his drab, tan overalls and the equally non-descript man wearing them.  
"Were you expecting six feet of handsome blond, with piercing blue eyes to match?" Lizzie grinned.  
"I suppose he is six feet tall."  
All the same, Sam was slightly disappointed that the first and only Jerry she was ever likely to meet looked as if he had grown up in Lyeminster.  
"Not everyone can look like Commander Auchinleck," Lizzie sighed. "Pity about his manners!"  
The name rang a bell. Sam didn't know anyone with blond hair and pale eyes, aside from Mitchell, or someone she had seen at H.M.S. Forward—  
"Oh, isn't he the one from Canada?" she said. "That's the one Mr. Foyle recognised!"  
"Dear me, is he finally up to no good after all?"  
Meanwhile, the anonymous Jerry had busied himself with the weekly rations for Lizzie, Viscount Fairbanks and the officers at the manor. Non-coms and other ranks apparently looked after themselves, for which Sam's knees were very grateful. So was the Viscount's daughter, judging from the winning smile she adopted whenever he glanced in her direction.  
"Telephone!" he called.  
Small chunks of gravel sprayed from his heavy boots as he ran. The man stopped two feet from her and pointed back in the direction whence he had come.  
"For a certain Corporal Sam Stewart," he noted.  
She swallowed awkwardly. What was she supposed to say? It wasn't as if Sam had done any fighting. Even if she had joined to help the war effort, she thought, doggedly squashing any hopes of escaping dull, tiny Lyminster and her father's parish.  
"They are still on the line, _Fräulein._ "  
She pelted in the direction of the telephone. Then, feeling very much an idiot, she turned around and added a belated "Thank you!"  


Milner had gone off without her. First Sam thought that that was abysmally unfair, then she thought that it was all her fault for gallivanting off first, then she realised that perhaps he had wanted to leave her behind. He might have had better sense, considering that Mr. Foyle had gone running off and ended up in an explosion! She carefully tore up the blades of grass that framed the nearest edge of the picnic rug.  
"I thought Ernst would look terribly handsome when Daddy announced that he had arranged a prisoner of war to help with the gardening, you can't imagine how disappointed I was."  
Between the flush on Lizzie's cheeks and the use of his first name, Sam very much doubted that. Had she been so transparent where Andrew was concerned?  
"Do they really let him out, just to water a few petunias and clip the hedges?" Sam asked.  
To cover her faux pas, she reached for the strawberries, newly-purloined from one of the greenhouses. Sadly, the cream was rationed.  
"He tends the greenhouses, too."  
"No wonder you knew we wouldn't ger in trouble!" Sam burst out laughing. "Here I was, imagining that we were on a scrumping adventure."  
"We had better eat them before John comes along!"  
Sam reached for the fruit again. Perhaps Mr. Foyle would arrest her for theft if he knew!  
"The old chap's past drafting age, but I very much doubt that our head gardener actually does any work. He just cycles after Ernst and gives instructions."  
Lizzie followed her own advice. Sam's new friend didn't look the slightest bit posh, sprawled out on an old rug in the middle of nowhere-in-particular…except that nowhere was an acre of wood at the top of the Fairbanks estate.  
"Have all your staff gone to the war?" Sam asked quickly.  
"Everyone has! Even my brothers!"  
This heralded a cascade of sniffing. Sam lunged for the pocket of her uniform skirt and her handkerchief.  
"Here. I'm terribly sorry, that's awful."  
Lizzie took off her glasses to wipe her eyes. She clutched at the handkerchief on one hand and the sunglasses in the other.  
"These are…were…my brother's. My bother, I used to call Tom!"  
Sam patted her arm as if it were a spider, looking around for someone to help. She really wasn't any good at this.  
"I'm an only child," Sam began. "Although there's Andrew, he's sort of a brother."  
Her friend nodded, blond curls bobbing with the motion. Sam took that to mean "I remember," rather than "Yes, me too, now."  
"Do forgive me, I just…"  
Awkwardly, she handed back the handkerchief.  
"No, no, keep it!"  
Sam rattled around in the bottom of the picnic basket. Her father was always offering his parishioners tea to calm them.  
"Here, have a drink, you'll feel better. There's only coffee, I'm afraid."  
Lizzie wiped her eyes on the sleeve of her blouse.  
"You must see rather a lot of this, growing up in a church."  
"My father says that tea always helps. The less tea and the more whiskey in it, the better!"  
That brought a faint smile to her friend, at least. Sam decided that this was an excellent time for them to head back to the manor.  


Sam was almost certain that this way not the way they had come. She bit her tongue. Asking someone whether they knew where they were in their own grounds was a sure recipe for disaster.  
"Listen, I do apologise about earlier. I must have sounded a right fool!"  
Lizzie trailed off. She took a few calming breaths before trying again.  
"My stupid younger brother went to France, although it really isn't his fault for being a second son, so naturally my elder brother went running off over there too, God knows what he thought he was doing when they weren't even in the same battalion!"  
Her hands shook very slightly on the handkerchief.  
"When that Spook Division took two hundred miles in one day, was it Dick who got shot up and captured? Of course it bloody wasn't, because he wasn't the sensible one!" she burst out.  
"At least he's just captured," said Sam.  
Lizzie nodded again.  
"Tom is! What about my other brother? Father's gone and disinherited Dickon! It doesn't bother _him_ that his son is off in North Africa somewhere."  
"Oh!" said Sam. "Fighting Rommel again!"  
Lizzie nodded. Sam ought to have cheered her up somehow, but suggesting that her brother would return home unscathed felt rather like assuring the Gallic tribes of victory against Julius Caesar. Everyone in England knew Erwin Rommel's name.  
"Oh, here we are!"  
Lizzie pointed. 'Here' was a small wooden barn about the size of a terrace house in Hastings. Sam shifted the picnic basket to her other hand.  
"Commander Auchinleck caught Commander Ritchie while w— _he_ was coming out of here a fortnight ago."  
Sam tried not to raise her eyebrows in Mr. Foyle's best 'Young lady, do you really think I was born yesterday?' impression.  
"The Desert Fox has to lose eventually," she said hastily. "After you."  


With a hefty shove, the door creaked open. There was pile of hay in the corner—of course there was, Sam giggled to herself—but otherwise, the outhouse looked like a jumble sale of gardening tools. She sneezed.  
"That's exactly how Commander Auchinleck caught us!" her friend confessed.  
Sam started laughing, but that only stirred up more chaff.  
"The Afrika Korps is ninety miles from Alexandria, and you think they'll lose?"  
Looking as doubtful as Sam felt, Lizzie handed back the handkerchief. Sam nodded, coughing. Meanwhile, Lizzie started poking around in the gloom.  
"If anyone has bottles of whiskey hidden away…"  
"One suspects that it's Commander Ritchie?" Sam finished.  
"If it's as uncomfortable as his hay, I'm not entirely certain that I want to drink it," Lizzie said archly.  
For want of anywhere else to start looking, Sam stared poking around in the hay. The top layer was dry and brittle, long past its best. It prickled to her elbows, even through the uniform blouse, but not quite enough to make her reach for her long-discarded jacket in the picnic basket. Further down—  
Her fingers hit fabric.  
"Come over here and help!" she called.  
"That feels like silk. Very odd…there's no end to it!"  
Sam left Lizzie to unearth the edges of the fabric and started shifting hay like a madwoman. The voluminous fabric was neatly pinned down at six corners with bricks. Sam bent to shift those too.  
"Bloody hell! It's a parachute!"  
Sam nodded.  
"What's underneath?" she panted.  
They grabbed the parachute and shifted carefully.  
"That's a printing press, albeit a very antique one," said Lizzie. "We've had it lying around for ages. Why bother repairing it and hiding the damned thing under a parachute? It must weigh half a tonne."  
Along with the cast-iron paraphenalia which Sam assumed to be the printing press, there were several metal chests, far more familiar from her days of M.T.C. paperwork.  
"Pass me that crowbar," Sam said. "No, that's a wrench. The one next to it."  
Her friend handed it over. With a good shove, Sam popped the lock on the first chest.  
"Ink," she muttered.  
"Boring!" said her friend in uncanny imitation of Mr. Foyle's "Well, what did you expect?" tone. She pried open the next one, then the last.  
"Money. Pounds and pounds of it!" exclaimed Lizzie.  
She knelt and handed a bundle to Sam. There were neat piles of sequentially-numbered notes of all denominations, along with a great stack of neatly-bound blue booklets.  



	5. Chapter 5

Foyle was no longer in Intensive Care. His bedside table had a small vase of lilies, half-wilted; a children's book; a tray of vile-looking powdered-egg scrambled with powdered milk, bacon suet and water, a glass of yet more reconstituted milk and a hunk of National Loaf.  
"Even I wouldn't eat that!" Sam remarked.  
Foyle smiled ever-so-slightly.  
"It makes Woolton pie look appetising, doesn't it?" he rasped.  
"Not my Woolton pie, sir! Even the carrots went grey when I had finished with them," she chirped.  
Foyle nodded at the book.  
"Even more indigestible than that, Sam?"  
Milner picked it up. 'U-boot Fahrer von Heute' said the title. He struggled to keep the indignant glare from his face, but Foyle probably recognised every twitch of his eyebrows by now.  
"I thought you might find it illuminating," he said carefully, "That our main suspect's motive for arson wrote a book."  
"Some enterprising chap from the Propaganda Ministry, more likely," Foyle snapped.  
"I spend twenty minutes arguing to let you have captured books from a P.O.W. camp, and that's the thanks I get?"  
"Oh dear," said Sam hastily.  
She had opened the book to its frontispiece. The German typeface was indeed incomprehensible, but there was a black-and-white plate of the author in uniform.  
"If this captain had been doing the gardening, every Wren would be competing to smuggle him from captivity."  
Foyle's lips twitched. He looked askance at Milner. His voice softened.  
"My German's no bloody good! At least it has pictures."  
He shifted on the pillows. The half-sitting position made Foyle look more of an invalid than when he had lain prone in the intensive care cot. His bandages had been removed: the skin around his hands was pale and puckered from being under linen. The colour had returned to his face, but that only emphasised the grey hairs and the lines around his eyes.  
"Do you still think it was an accident?" asked Sam.  
"A witness reported seeing a lighted cigarette flicked into the stairwell."  
"Perhaps it wasn't ground out properly. Stupid, but not harmful," Milner suggsted.  
The pair of them playing devil's advocate triggered a wan smile. Better than nothing, Milner thought.  
"No," he broke into coughing.  
Sam opened the file they had copied from Mitchell and flicked through until Foyle pointed at a photograph. Sam slid it from the file.  
"Something blew the door open from the outside?"  
Foyle nodded. Milner pressed the glass of milk to his lips.  
"The water from the lilies would taste better!"  
He took another sip anyway.  
"I hid behind the damnable things. Someone left a few diesel barrels at the bottom. They were leaking, too. I remember the wet patches on the floor."  
"Did our cigarette-tosser know about them?" Sam asked. "With the door shut, he burns out a concrete stairwell, that's hardly a disaster."  
"Auchinleck would have, he must have passed them on the stairs."  
"Who was the witness?" Sam asked.  
Milner appropriated the relevant pages from the report.  
"Neil Auchinleck. It says here that our cigarette-tosser was Claude Ritchie."  
Foyle's eyebrows contracted. Milner wiped a smear of milk from the corner of his mouth with his handkerchief. The fussing only made his superior's frown deepen.  
"Suppose you are Ritchie," he ventured. "You and your rival stand at the top of the stairs, with the diesel at the bottom. You flick the cigarette down, leave and lock the door shut. The diesel explodes, forcing the hot gas upwards, your rival dies…but only if you can lock him in somehow."  
He passed the pages back to Sam. Sensibly, she pencilled in a page number at the top.  
"But according to this report, the door at the bottom was open slightly. The fuel vapours seeped out, right into the diesel fire. Now the fastest route for the fire is right into the storage dump. The vapours catch alight, heat the room to at least two hundred degrees and the fuel inside the tanks blows up."  
"Why didn't everything blow up?" Sam asked.  
Foyle set his half-empty milk glass on the table.  
"No oxygen, apparently. The air vents in that room shut down. The hardened steel doors are a foot thick, with four inches of vacuum in-between; the concrete is six feet thick, so the fireball ran out of air and burned itself out."  
"Bloody lucky, or the entire base would've been blown to kingdom come!"  
said Sam.  
"You saw the fuses go out, didn't you sir?"  
Foyle nodded. His eyes were still cloudy. In anyone else, his expression might have resembles remorse.  
"Was that our arsonist, or our ration forger?" he asked. "There's the real question. Is this a happy coincidence of petty theft and murder, or a botched attempt to obliterate an entire naval base?"  
"With our luck, the latter," Sam said. "But why would anyone be so suicidal as to blow up the base with himself in it? Even if he is a German spy!"  
"Steady on, Sam!" Milner laughed.  
"Well, why else would anyone want to blow up the base?"  
Foyle shifted again.  
"Both of you are forgetting something."  
"You were the last person to enter the fuel depot," Milner said.  
His superior only nodded.  
"That makes no bloody difference!" he exploded. "That does not mean that any of this was your fault!"  
Foyle merely slumped against the pillows, dismissing the pair of them with a wave.  


Milner sat in his office. He would have used Mr. Foyle's office, but it simply didn't seem right to sit in a better man's chair. "I can't do this godforsaken job on my own!" Foyle had confessed once. Now the both of the were trying to do it alone. Well, he reflected, at least he had Sam.  
"This entire mess is stupid," Sam cursed. "None of it makes any sense!"  
He looked up from behind the desk. There was another set of files from Mitchell, a bit more copying of Foyle's files, done hastily while Ross kept the Assistant Commissioner out of the way, and…  
"Is that an autopsy report?"  
Sam nodded. She did look rather the worse for wear, he noted, but it wasn't his place to comfort her, not when she had Andrew.  
"She was my friend," Sam hiccoughed, "At least until someone murdered her for good reason at all!"  
The pile of notes slid onto his desk in a cascade of typing paper. Milner wanted to put his arms around her, or offer his help like some white knight half a century ago, or anything; but this was Sam, and it was no good treating her like some damsel in distress. He may as well treat Mr. Foyle the same way!  
"Get your gloves, Sam."  
She looked up.  
"Come on! We can solve this together—without Mr. Foyle—and leave him to work on the other case."  
She didn't move.  
"Let's drive to Ashford, at least. We can look for evidence, do more interviews, liaise with the Rye police."  
Sam nodded, slightly less miserable than when she had first arrived.  


They drove in silence.  
"What are you going to tell Mr. Foyle so far?" Sam asked eventually.  
"When he decides to talk to us again?" he sighed.  
The silence resumed. The sky was overcast, sufficiently gloomy to suit Milner's temperament.  
"That this case just gets stranger and stranger. After the interrogations yesterday, I met the C.O. of your supposed prisoner of war."  
"Ernst?" she asked.  
"Ernst Tiemann," Milner agreed, "And you know, his captain swore blind that I was lying!"  
"What, he doesn't exist?"  
Milner rubbed his eyes against the glare. His foot was itching: the missing foot.  
"He certainly did exist, but the captain is adamant that he went down with the ship."  
He sighed.  
"I'm inclined to believe him."  
Sam's fingers tapped restlessly against the wheel.  
"Perhaps our prisoner is really a German spy!"  
"Don't be daft, Sam! If he were a spy, why would his fellow German help us out by casting suspicion on him? Why isn't he stealing battle plans or digging tunnels under the flowerbeds?"  
"Well, the most dangerous act of sabotage he's committed is winking at the local girls—"  
"—I suppose you have all the local gossip—" said Milner dryly.  
She nodded. Her fingers stopped tapping.  
"God above, Sam, I'm sorry. I, I—all this business with Mr. Foyle worries me to no end. The more we dig, the more complicated everything gets."  
"And he won't ask for help!" Sam added.  
He nodded miserably.  
"Daft old coot," she muttered.  
"Anyway, it turns out that Commander Ritchie is the darling of the girls at the base. He's been through half the stenographers—even tried to seduce Lady Fairbanks's daughter, though no-one was quite certain of the outcome… It's caused a lot of friction between him and our suspect. Commander Auchinleck takes a dim view of his men stepping out with the locals. He's thirty going on sixty if you ask me!"  
Under other circumstances, that might have warranted a smile.  
"Enough friction to frame his rival for the mix-up?" Milner suggested. "We only have Auchinleck's word for it that Ritchie started the fire."  
He lapsed into silence. Milner could imagine Mr. Foyle's reaction to that: Occam's razor. Why make something more complicated than events require?  
"It's worth suggesting to Foyle, isn't it?" Sam doggedly continued.  
Milner just nodded. Something was wrong with Mr. Foyle, something beyond a bit of gas inhalation and a guilty conscience.  


Milner examined Elizabeth Fairbanks's room carefully. The four-poster bed still had her corpse lying on it, but at least someone had had the decency to draw the curtains. The Medical Examiner had come and gone, with a provisional cause of death of asphyxiation. The crime photographers were waiting outside: the civilian one for Milner to leave and the M.P. for Mitchell to arrive. Two glasses and a bottle of half-empty Macallan Rare whiskey lay on one side-table; on the other, there was a dog-eared book of poetry. _The Works of Gaius Valerius Catullus_ read the title. Inside it was all Latin—and mostly very risque, if he remembered his school-days! Otherwise, everything was much how he would imagine a young lady's bedroom to be, from the tasselled lampshades to the thick carpet.  
There lay the problem.  
He considered calling Sam to help him. One look at the curtained bed put paid to that idea.  
"I rather think this is my fault," said a voice from the doorway.  
There stood Commander Auchinleck—immaculate and perfectly dry-eyed.  
"You see, Detective, Commander Ritchie never reported back from the P.O.W. camp last night. After seeing this, I rather fear that he has gone on the run. As has our prisoner-cum-gardener Tiemann."  
Milner closed his eyes wearily. Damn it, where was Foyle when he was needed?  



	6. Chapter 6

Two of Mitchell's men frogmarched the newly-captured Tiemann into reception. Milner felt a warm glow of relief spread over him when he caught sight of Foyle chatting to Constable Rivers at the front desk. Perhaps things would get back to normal soon.  
"Foyle, good to see you on your feet!" Mitchell called.  
Both of them headed for the front desk, while the two other ranks stood with their prisoner in the middle of the room.  
"Stay out of any explosions, will you?" he continued. "And possibly any secret military bases while you're at it?"  
Foyle retrieved his hat from the desk.  
"Of course," he returned. "Right after I make Milner a D.I."  
"Foyle!" shouted Tiemann.  
Heads turned. The publican at the Red Lion looked about to faint, seeing a Jerry in the flesh. Mrs. Widdecombe had readied her sewing needles.  
"Major Christopher Foyle?" he repeated.  
The military police decided that this was an opportune time to drag him towards the door, twisting like an eel in his handcuffs. Tiemann swept his foot out and flipped the left-hand man over his hip. The man went down cursing. The prisoner dropped his shoulder into the right hand man's sternum and slammed his elbow into his neck. Milner saw his old C.O. reach for his pistol and grabbed his wrists. Mitchell let him have the gun, then dodged around him and rugby tackled the German to the floor.  
"Foyle! Damn you, I didn't kill her, I swear!"  
This last was somewhat muffled, owing to the fact that Mitchell was now sitting on Tiemann like a very flat, increasingly outraged sewing pouffe. The D.C.S. had been observing the scene in silence. He studied the man for a long moment, in his torn German uniform and worn-out boots. Then he walked over and helped him to his feet.  
"Criston Ross? Good to see you again, Lieutenant! Special Intelligence Service treating you well?"  


Twice in the space of two days, Milner found himself exiled outside an interview room. Fortunately, he was perfectly able to see both suspect and interrogator. There was no rain soaking him to the bone, nor any nagging concerns about Foyle's health, so he really ought to count himself lucky. Yet something about the entire series of events troubled him.  
"Tea, sir?"  
Constable Rivers knocked on the frame of the door.  
"Yes, please, Constable."  
"Have we arrested the four horsemen of the Apocalypse, Rivers? A large brandy in mine, please." Sam asked.  
Rivers laughed, then beat a hasty retreat. Milner waved Sam over, keeping his eyes fixed on Tiemann, or Ross, or whatever the spy's real name was. He sighed. If the man was any good, surely he would be trained to telegraph whatever he wanted with his body language. What was the point?  
"Major Foyle. Did you know anything about that, Milner?"  
Charles Mitchell leaned his six-foot frame against the doorway. Milner pinched the bridge of his nose in an attempt to remain alert.  
"Don't be daft!"  
He did, of course. Had he accepted Foyle's offer, would it be him sitting in the interrogation room? Perhaps he might not have been so lucky and would be sitting in a Gestapo cell outwitting his captors, or recuperating from a bad parachute drop in the care of the French Resistance, or any number of things which had seemed terribly exciting from the safety of a Scotland Yard desk. Yet he had resisted. Common sense had kicked in, probably.  
"Do _you_ think Foyle's still working for Intelligence, Captain?" Sam probed.  
"Why bother?" Mitchell laughed. "What sort of exciting things happen in Hastings?"  
His position by the door was interrupted by Rivers's arrival. He handed out the tea, informed Sam that rationing had given her a very small brandy, then returned to the front desk. She blew on her tea ferociously. Milner watched her eyebrows crease.  
"You know, we only discovered the ration books because of this tea," Sam muttered.  
Milner wanted to ask what the devil she was talking about. It took only the memory of the last soggy afternoon with Foyle's precious fly-fishing rods for him to hold his tongue. How may times had his superior's successful catch silently reprimanded him for being too impatient? Foyle had even given him half the catch, providing both him and Sam with a fine dinner. The gallantry was step too far, Milner had decided, and left the fly-fishing to Andrew in future.  
"What if I had stolidly remained at my post, just like they teach us at the M.T.C., instead of gallivanting off? Or not mentioned Rommel, or any number of things, really? What's one forgery ring worth, next to murder?"  
"What?" he said distractedly, watching Tiemann gesture emphatically about something.  
Foyle had some letters on the desk, too far away to read. Milner bravely swigged his tea, thankfully free from the powdered milk. Perhaps he ought to have asked for a brandy as well. At least it would disguise the tea!  
"It can't be coincidence! Lizzie just happens to be murdered by her jealous lover, right after discovering a German parachute and a blackmail factory?"  
"How do you know what they say?" Mitchell asked.  
"I don't know what they say, I mean I don't speak a word of German, but it's obvious, isn't it? What else does a young girl keep sewn into the lining of her pillowcase but love notes?"  
He tore his eyes from the pair arguing in the interview room. Why didn't Foyle let him in, after all the help he had been trying to run this case on his own?  
"I went back to Ashford House to have a look around. Everyone had finished photographing and fingerprinting and everything—don't worry—and I ended up having a more detailed look around than I really expected."  
Everything came out in a jumble of nerves. He considering trying to say something consoling, then gave up and nodded.  
"Then you rushed back here and gave the evidence to Foyle?" Mitchell said.  
Sam had finally started to look herself again. She even managed a smile.  
"The military police are useless when it comes to working out love-smitten young ladies!"  
Her forehead creased.  
"Oh, blast it! Was I supposed to give them to you? You was too busy talking to Auchinleck for me to get a word in."  
Now there was an odd combination! Milner watched Foyle follow his intelligence man into the corridor. Grateful for any excuse to stop drinking the tea, he hurried after them.  


Unfortunately, Mitchell had longer legs than he did. By the time he reached Foyle's office, Commander Ritchie's interrogation was in full swing. He had handed himself into Constable Rivers earlier this morning, with some fanciful tale of being at the opera in London all night, before returning to find Elizabeth Fairbanks dead. Foyle, meanwhile, was confronting him with the same letters he had shown to Tiemann.  
"I bought a ticket to Covent Garden, damn you! E15 in the stalls, if you bother to ring them up. I came in good faith to tell you about this tunnelling fiasco, now I'm accused of murder! How can I kill someone while listening to Wagner miles away?"  
"Very easily," Charles whispered into his ear.  
That stopped Foyle mid-sentence. The pair of them received the full force of his glare.  
"Tunnel fiasco?" he muttered to Mitchell, eyebrows raised.  
"Escaped P.O.W.s dug under the entire bloody fence system! All while Ritchie was at the opera, of course…which is why there was no roll-call last night."  
His superior's breath was hot on the nape of his neck. Meanwhile, Ritchie was fingering one of the notes. He shook his head steadily.  
"You are the spring for which I have longed, in frosty winter's desolation…When my eyes first saw you, I knew you were mine!"  
He smacked the paper back onto Foyle's desk.  
"Drivel!" he sneered.  
Foyle tilted his head lightly. Gently, his fingers reclaimed the note.  
"German drivel," he commented. "Drivel you would know, having heard these lines at the opera that night. _Die Walküre_ , isn't it?"  
He paused, watching Ritchie's unblinking stare, armoured in confidence. Milner was reminded of the young Lieutenant-Commander he had met—God, was it only two days ago?  
"You didn't, of course."  
Milner watched his superior lean back slightly; nonchalently.  
"A naval commander did turn up for the opera with your name on the ticket—but he was blond, not brunet. Auchinleck provided you with the perfect alibi."  
Ritchie's mouth opened, then closed again. He snatched the note from Foyle's hands.  
"Auchinleck," he breathed. "The bloody man's left-handed. Look!"  
He brandished it under Foyle's nose.  
"It's true, sir."  
Milner met the sceptical set of his superior's thin lips.  
"I saw his watch, he wears it on his right hand."  
He took a deep breath, heart hammering. How often did he contradict a man whom he so admired?  
"All this time we thought Ritchie murdered Lady Elisabeth, while he had his alibi, but what if it was Auchinleck? Not in a fit of jealous rage, but as Sam said, because she discovered the forgery equipment? She simply guessed the wrong officer in which to trust—"  
"It's true!" Ritchie burst out, "I saw her sobbing into his duty blues yesterday. I thought she was in tears over that Jerry!"  
He scowled.  
"Then Auchinleck writes the love notes off the top of his head from the opera and plants them?" Mitchell snapped. "Have neither of you heard of Occam's bloody razor?"  
Ritchie's glare was no match for Mitchell's. He broke away to stare at Foyle instead.  
"Auchinleck's the spy!" he burst out. "Let me prove it! Let me do this one thing for my country, for the war, for all of us. I'll be hanged if I don't, damn you!"  
"Not if you help us," Milner commented.  
The man nodded.  
"Exactly! Look, you need my help, whether you realise it or not. I know how Auchinleck thinks. I know what he'll do, how to stop him. If we go there together—"  
"You'll help us chase after Auchinleck—and while we're on our wild goose chase, you'll slip away," Mitchell snapped.  
Milner stood, ignoring the rest of Ritchie's protests.  
"No. Take him to the cells and keep him under constant watch."  
He turned his back on the man and walked from the room.  



	7. Chapter 7

Hurtling down a B-road at forty miles per hour was hardly the best place for an argument. Nonetheless, Milner found himself in the midst of one.  
"It was just invented, wasn't it?"  
Milner's voice rose steadily.  
"One of them had to be the spy," his old friend responded. "Now we know which."  
"You guessed blindly!" Milner snapped. "And invented evidence to boot! All that nonsense about having a witness to the catalyst for the explosion."  
"What, Foyle doesn't count?"  
If Milner clenched his jaw any harder, it might break. Now he realised why he hadn't written to Mitchell since his demobilisation.  
"Wipe that betrayed look off your face, idiot. So what if it hadn't been Ritchie? Either way, they had to be separated. Arrest the spy, by some convenient accident, then his operation fails. Arrest the wrong man, then the spy has no cover and has to give himself away to complete the mission. You have to admit that it makes sense."  
It did, but Christopher Foyle would never have done such a thing. He lapsed into silence. Despite being half-eight in the evening, the sky was still light. Dönitz must have been truly desperate to slip a submarine into an enemy harbour in these conditions.  
"You brood almost as well as your superior," Mitchell laughed. "Is the scowl just for plain-clothes officers?"  
"Standard issue with every police whistle," he retorted. "It's this bloody war! Before enlistment started, being a detective commanded respect. Now every uniform thinks we're glorified draft dodgers!"  
"Is that why you volunteered?" he asked mildly.  
Milner tore his eyes from the countryside. The pair of them had become very drunk once, which was just about the only way to get a straight answer from a green soldier, instead of a torrent of bravado.  
"The Paul Milner I remember didn't give tuppence about respect. He just wanted to do an honest job for his country."  
Milner snorted.  
"Just goes to show, doesn't it? When did Charles Mitchell switch from evading M.P.s to giving them orders?"  
"I liked the handcuffs," he joked.  
They fell silent. Mitchell continued to follow Auchinleck's car down the maze of green, blowing the horn every half-minute to warn oncoming traffic along the single lane.  
"Fine spot for an ambush," he muttered.  
"I don't like it much either," said Mitchell.  
His eyes were fixed on the road. The silence gave Milner more time to mull over Foyle's curious behaviour. When was the last time Foyle had ordered him to go about armed, let alone lie to a superior in the bargin?  


The sky was just darkening as the P.O.W. compound came into view. The open countryside provided no cover for escapees and the deliberately twisting road prevented any high-speed escapes or break-ins at the boom gate. It worked the other way, too, Milner reflected uneasily. All Auchinleck needed was a friend in the guard towers with a sniper rifle.  
"Flip a coin?"  
"What?" he asked.  
Mitchell shrugged.  
"How else to decide which prisoner to take? Either way we're stuck driving all the way to London," he grumbled.  
"Whichever talks less," Milner replied.  
Of course, Milner had no plan to leave Foyle's side on a diversion to London. Unfortunately, the right time to admit this to his former commander was proving difficult to find. Why not just let him into the conspiracy? Throughout the journey Milner had turned the puzzle over in his mind. It was obvious that Ritchie's arrest would give Auchinleck a free hand. At the heart of it, both Foyle and Mitchell had the same logic: convince Auchinleck that he had won, then permit him to trap himself. The pair of them had been only too happy to arrest Ritchie as a spy, right under his supposed colleague's nose. Mitchell had provided half-a-dozen R.M.P.s to transport the man all the way to London, despite that leaving him with no backup.  
"Shall we, gentlemen?"  
Commander Auchinleck strolled over to the pair of them.  
"Of course," Mitchell replied for both of them.  
Milner nodded. He steeled himself from the temptation to draw his pistol and kneecap Auchinleck there and then. There was no proof, not yet, only Foyle's impeccable logic.  
"Good evening, Detective Sergeant," called a voice. "If only it were a pleasure to see you again."  
"Pity, you'll have my company all the way to London, Lieutenant-Commander," he fired back.  
A knot of guards marched two men towards the cars. Auchinleck turned his way with a frown.  
"Did Chief Superintendednt Foyle not make it clear that you are here in a supervisory role?"  
Milner met his glare of disapproval with ease.  
"We are supervising."  
The spy started to argue about whose fault it would be if either of them escaped. Around them, the guards grew increasingly restless. Milner ignored it. Their bruised pride was not his concern. The sight of fixed bayonets did concern him. Compared to a rifle with two feet of sharpened steel at the end, his pistol was hardly intimidating. If the prisoners decided to make a run for it, would it deter them? He hated shooting to kill. Worse were Foyle's quiet reprimands afterwards. Somehow the man knew exactly how to stir up Milner's guilty conscience.  
"Commander Auchinleck has a point," Mitchell interrupted.  
Milner turned to open a second front, but his former C.O. placed a hand on his arm.  
"Civilian police have no right to interfere with the Royal Navy's handling of military matters."  
"Thank you, Captain."  
"Her Majesty's Military Police do," he continued blandly.  
Milner suppressed a smile.  
"I have every authority to separate your prisoners and transport one of them. Should the D.S. happen to accompany me, that is no business of her Majesty's navy."  
Jaw twitching, Auchnleck waved for his driver to put Schepke's things in the boot of Milner's unmarked car.  
"Thank you, Commander."  
Milner recieved a glare in return.  
"I expect you to follow me," he snapped.  
That, considered Milner, was exactly what they would do. Hopefully, even if the U-boat managed to penetrate the defenses, the man would lead them straight to it.  


"Oh, for fuck's sake!" Mitchell muttered.  
The car slowed to a gradual stop. Beside Milner, Schepke opened one luminously-blue eye.  
"Flat tyre," Mitchell explained.  
The eye closed again. He clambered out of the car, leaving the engine running. Milner followed his lead. The pistol felt very heavy in its shoulder holster.  
"We don't really have time for this," Milner said.  
He took a deep breath. Foyle had expressly told him not to tell anyone about Auchinleck, but the man wasn't onmiscient. Milner heard Auchinleck's lead increasing with every fading horn blast.  
"I know who the spy is," he said urgently. "It's not Ritchie."  
Mitchell almost looked hurt. Instead he annexed most of Milner's personal space in revenge.  
"I suppose Foyle ordered you to lie to me," he started wearily."You always did have a fondness for taking instruction from your superiors."  
Milner bit the inside of his cheek, hard. It was either that or lose his temper.  
"Foyle and I are _not_ —" he snapped.  
Mitchell started laughing. From this distance, Milner could see the gold flecks in his eyes. Milner might very well have entertained the idea—more than once, admittedly—but he would never dare suggest anything to Foyle.  
"The man is my superior," he began hotly.  
The response was a shrug. Mitchell's nonchalance struck him more than any suggestive whispers of "So was I." Foyle's scruples would never stand for any intimacy between ranks. Disconcerted, he buried the topic in the back of his mind. They had to catch him before the spy left the single-lane confine of the hedgerows.  
"The spy is Auchinleck. We were suppoed to lead him to the docks, right into Foyle's trap, or at least tail him if he had some alternative escape planned."  
"Well, that plan's fucked, isn't it?" said Mitchell, almost pleasantly.  
He walked off and stuck his head into the boot.  
"Get on the radio and tell Foyle what's happened. I'll patch up the tyre."  
He hefted a toolbox in one hand and a flashlight in the other. Milner nodded, then realised that Charlie couldn't see it. The wireless set was in the boot. Milner cursed himself for not packing a spare flashlight. What would he have done with it in a chase? It required one hand to lift the box-sized portable light and another to wield a pistol. He felt cautiously in the half-darkness. Next to Schepke's prosthetics lay a neatly-folded wool suit and greatcoat. A small round tin contained a spare box of matches, a pipe, a variety of wallet litter and the familiar contours of a military identity card. Milner lighted a match to tune the radio, which—of course—was not on the civilian police frequency. Foyle sounded terse even through the static.  
"Done!" he reported.  
Another match was required to retune the radio. Milner squinted at the red tuning line. Originally, the frequency had been much lower. He frowned. Surely it was the other way around? Low frequencies were only good for long-distance work, where one needed to bounce the radio waves off the ionosphere.  
"I'm still going here!" called Mitchell.  
His match was running out. He opened the tin to return the box. The light caught the crest of the Royal Navy on the identification card, stamped over the edges of Schepke's portrait. _Of course._ The military man's instinct in danger was to jump to attention. With the escaped prisoners as a diversion, Auchinleck's two prize aces would walk right from Rye harbour onto the waiting U-boat. The spy had put his disguise right under Milner's nose—and he and Mitchell had driven it straight out of the P.O.W compound. No wonder Foyle had been dropping hints about the White Feather case all afternoon!  
"Mitchell?" he called again.  
Someone tapped him on the shoulder. His head snapped up, following the line of his pistol. His skull hit the bonnet with a crack. Milner saw stars. Laughter stirred the hairs on the back of his neck.  
"Bloody Hell, Charles, I nearly shot you!" he croaked.  
Milner returned the pistol to its holster, then lifted his fingers to the back of his head to inspect the damage. Still chuckling, Mitchell kissed his fingers lazily, trapping Milner's gun hand beneath his jaw.  
"Perhaps I had better remove the temptation," he said dryly.  
Mitchell slid a hand around him and calmly removed the pistol from its holster.  



	8. Chapter 8

Mr. Foyle had resumed his usual post in the passenger seat of the car. Sam firmly squashed the smile on her face as she tore through the streets with the siren at full blast.  
"At least we know who killed Lizzie," Sam said. "Her jilted, short-tempered lover!"  
Sam felt Foyle's eyes settle on her for the tiniest fraction longer than normal. She felt six again, being chastised for playing in the wrong section of the parish graveyard.  
"He has motive, opportunity, fled the scene of the crime…who else can it be, sir? It isn't this intelligence chap, or at least I hope not, if you're vouching for him."  
"I'll give you a hint: whom do we know who goes to the opera?"  
That left her feeling cross and puzzled. Auchinleck had given her a programme from the Royal Opera House yesterday—when she had been stuck in his office after bawling like a damsel in distress—but all her play-acting had discovered was that Neil Ritchie liked Wagner. Surely it wasn't that easy?  
"You look rather less ill than Milner, sir."  
"With this driving, are you surprised that Milner looked a little green?"  
"A very green kicked puppy, sir," she agreed.  
From the corner of her eye, Sam saw Mr. Foyle's brows knit slightly. He remained tactfully silent.  
"He does like feeling sorry for himself on occasion. Anway, it's very clever of our spy to choose a small village instead of the main harbour at Hastings."  
She careened the wrong way down a one-way street, took a sharp left across two lanes of traffic, then swung onto the harbour road. The harbour itself was three miles or so out of town. Mr. Foyle closed his eyes briefly as they left the cobbles for tarmac. Sam even fancied that she heard a sight of relief, but of course with the siren still going, that was impossible.  
"The navy has amphibious landings here all the time," Mr. Foyle admitted. "It's a small base with lots of recruits from the Commonwealth. Hastings would be far too busy. The local police chief is meeting us at the harbour, I believe. Speak of the devil!"  
The unexpected torrent of words from Mr. Foyle almost distracted Sam from finding the harbour entrance. She slammed the brakes too hard, causing Mr. Foyle to be thrown against the glovebox. Sam jumped out and held the door for him in apology. A uniformed D.I. waited with two constables. Further towards the docks, she saw the now-familiar tangle of barbed wire, sentry boxes and boom gates.  
"Detective Inspector Jones."  
He nodded politely in Sam's direction and returned his attntion to Foyle. Jones had the sort of figure which suggested that it had been many years since he had been on the beat. Sam caught a whiff of cheap aftershave, beer, and the officiousness of a local plod paid very little to do long hours chasing matters of minor importance. Mr. Foyle held out a hand for the Detective Inspector.  
"My name's Foyle. I'm the Detective Chief Superintendent for East Sussex. I'm here to see the R.N. flag officer for Rye. It's most urgent."  
"May I see your identification, Chief Superintendent?"  
"I'm afraid not, Inspector. I lost the papers last week. The Assistant Comissioner is still drawing up new ones."  
D.I. Jones waved to his constables.  
"Unfortunately for you, I've met Foyle this very week. Arrest this man for treason. He's a German spy."  
The two men grabbed Mr. Foyle's shoulders. He submitted to the handcuffs without a struggle. No-one paid any attention to Sam. She leapt for the car door, flung her hat at the man who tried to chase after her and scrambled into the driver's seat. Milner had to be able to sort this out.  


Twenty mintes later, the car ran out of petrol. Sam jumped out and sprinted the last streets to the police station at a speed she hadn't used since being pursued by her father keen to apply the wooden spoon to her nine-year-old bottom.  
"Rivers! Rivers!"  
She pelted to the desk. Constable Rivers was on duty, occupied by Mrs. Widdecombe and her tiresome complaints about God-knew-what.  
"Mr. Foyle's been arrested for being a German spy!" she gasped.  
To his credit, Rivers didn't bat a single drooping eyelid. Mrs. Widdecombe, however, was likely to tell the entire town by morning.  
"Mr. Milner and Captain Mitchell are on their way to Rye, but they have a flat tyre. That German chap's in the cells."  
Sam cursed enough to make the air turn blue.  
"The Assistant Commisioner is in his office, Miss Stewart. Might he help?"  
She nodded frantically and tore off again. Ten minutes later, Sam found herself driving the Assistant Commissioner for all of South-eastern England back through Hastings on the way to Rye Harbour. It took all the rest of the journey to fill in even the bare bones of the case. The more she talked, the more confused he looked. Nonetheless, it was worth a month's pay to watch A.C. Rose march straight into Rye police station, corner the offending D.I. and explode in his face like the _Hindenburg_.  


Conditions were well into twilight by the time the harbour's flag officer was persuaded to co-operate.  
"First you arrest all my men, then you want to release them temporarily, now you insist that there's a national emergency in the back of beyond? I've got six different navies grafting their command structure onto mine, responsibility for 22. Sussex Home Guard Regiment and have to supervise all of the Cinque Ports harbour defenses. I don't have time for any tarraddidle!"  
The Vice-Admiral's cigar was thankfully unlighted. It didn't prevent him from waving it around his office emphatically. Without the blackout curtains drawn, the room probably offered a commanding view of Rye's small harbour.  
"We have established that the arrests were a mistake," snapped Rose.  
"The man arresting yours was a German spy," added Jones.  
"Oh aye? You were only to happy to help, as I recall!"  
Jones's eyebrows climbed into his receeding hairline. Sam couldn't tell whether the cause was rage or simply incomprehension of the admiral's Edinburgh accent.  
"Now look here—" Jones started.  
"What about this man who claimed to be me?" Foyle asked.  
"You're Fole, are you? You've shrunk half a foot."  
Mr. Foyle's lips tightened.  
"My name is Foyle," he enunciated carefully.  
"I have you to thank for hauling my men off duty all this week on a raft of charges? Forged money, fake ration books, profiteering—?"  
"Treason, in other words," snapped Jones.  
"A very wee treason! And the rest are on punishments thanks to the R.M.P. for drunken-and-disorderly!"  
It was all rather clever, Sam considered. The spy manufactured the forgeries himself, lured men into using them with his rank like a naval Mephistopheles, then arrested them when his plan required. This had been going on for months, yet even Foyle had only traced the case to a false trail to the Brighton Ration Office.  
"I'll wager that the man who stole my papers was six foot tall, blond, grey eyes? Windsor accent?"  
His opponent leaned over the desk. A pair of binoculars were slung about his neck. Half-a-dozen medals glinted on his duty uniform.  
"First rule of bluffing: don't give away too much."  
Mr. Foyle's head tilted slightly. The tightness around his eyes spelled out the disbelief that it wasn't Auchinleck. Neither D.I. Jones nor A.C. Rose were looking terribly impressed either.  
"Fine," Foyle said, perfectly measured.  
"Dark hair, American accent, mildly irritating?" he tried.  
"No."  
"Give up, Foyle!" Rose eploded.  
"Sir, if the spy is neither Neil Auchinleck nor Claude Ritchie, then we are at a loose end."  
Rose waved him into silence.  
"Just let the damned man give you a description!"  
"With pleasure," said the Vice-Admiral. "Tall, ginger, green eyes. At least you had 'mildly irritating' correct."  
"Mitchell?" Sam blurted out.  
Heads turned. She had forgotten that things were getting back to normal and that Milner no longer required her as an interview partner.  
"I sent him with Milner," Foyle breathed.  
She had never seen Mr. Foyle move so fast. He snatched up his hat and bolted downstairs at a rate which belied his four days in hospital.  


Sam heaved her flashlight out of the boot. It wasn't overly heavy, but the damn thing was very cumbersome. Worse, it told any clever clogs around where she was before she would see them. She didn't think that she could stand one more "Stay with the car" order. What else was there to do? The squabbling policemen had finally decided to let the Royal Navy do their jobs properly. The guards had been doubled at every pillbox between Newhaven and Brighton; the Home Guard were out with the local constabulary combing the area for prisoners who had escaped through the tunnels; the admiral who had been so contemptuous of Mr. Foyle ten minutes earlier was radioing minesweepers and ordering destroyers out of port and constantly asking for hydrophone, ADSIC and RADAR updates. She had taken the flashlight and a crowbar from the tolls in the boot in case anyone came her way. After winding down the window on her side of the car, the summer breeze stopped her from nodding off. Now all that was left to do was worry about Milner.  
"Corporal Stewart?"  
A car drew up alongside hers.  
"Commander Auchinleck!" she said in relief.  
He and his fellow officer hurried from the car. A glance at the size of the gold bands on their uniforms suggested that the other man was his second-in-command.  
"What the devil is going on? Detective Sergeant Milner was tailing us, but we lost sight of him. When the call for assistance came out, we were halfway to Ashford. I dropped off my prisoner and scrambled back to Hastings."  
"The entire port is on alert and every ship is being sent out to ambush the U-boat when it comes in! It would all be terribly exciting, if I had anything to do!"  
The officer managed a laugh. He leaned on his crossed arms, perched on the sill of her window. He drew a breath.  
"Miss Stewart, I ought to apologise to you about the Lady Elizabeth. I ought to have reported Commander Ritchie to someone when I first discovered that they were…well, I suppose my condolences are too little, too late now."  
Sam nodded. Last night she had barely had a wink of sleep, tossing and turning over the events of the last few days.  
"I—"  
She yawned.  
"Exciting, is it?" the other officer said dryly.  
"We found the spy! It was Mitchell, all along?"  
A crease appeared in the Commander's handsome brow. Sam wanted to stamp her foot in impatience, but it was currently on the accelerator.  
"The military policeman, Milner's friend!"  
"Ah, yes. Unpleasant chap—"  
He stopped mid-sentence.  
"He has Schepke, I let him walk out with him right under my nose! Did you get the pair of them?"  
Sam shook her head. After a moment's hesitation, Auchinleck opened the door for her.  
"Are you waiting on the wrong side of the guard posts all night, Corporal?"  


Drydock No. 2 was empty and locked. Sam hefted the crowbar. Auchinleck's junior officer hastily stepped out of the way. The commander himself was glancing anxiously at his watch.  
"If Günther Prien is using the same tactics as Scapa Flow, he'll be here," the man said.  
"Sink a destroyer, then come out of the harbour when everyone has their guns pointed the other way. Simple, but effective."  
After a decent wrench, the chains broke. The two officers were having a hushed conversation just out of Sam's earshot.  
"Done!" Sam panted.  
The other two drew their pistols. Sam turned on the flashlight.  
"Ladies first," gestured Auchinleck.  
Sam stepped into the gloom. The beam of the torch swept a cone of light barely six feet in front of her. Unidentifiable equipment, coils of rope, spare jerry cans and other paraphenalia littered the space. The dry dock itself was empty, the winch swinging over a pit which gave the repairmen access to the bottom of a ship's hull. Sam tried to peer over the edge, but Auchinleck caught her by the belt.  
"Do try not to fall in."  
"Please do," said Mitchell.  
For a man with a Luger levelled at him, Auchinleck looked incredibly unruffled. He holstered his own weapon slowly, then raised his hands.  
"If that goes off, every guard for a mile will come running," Sam said.  
Mitchell shrugged. Sam still held the flashlight. It would make a fine throwing weapon, if she got the chance.  
"Why bother? Push you into the drydock and no-one will think twice about it being an accident."  
The German spy gestured with the pistol. For a moment, it was pointed not at Auchinleck, but harmlessly between him and Sam. A wet crunching noise reached her ears, before the man collapsed suddenly.  
"Sorry, it took me a while to file off the cuffs," said Milner. "Mitchell clocked me on the head, handcuffed me and put me in the boot of my own car!"  
He held a heavy-looking metal rasp, presumably the same instrument he had used to scrape open the cuffs. Auchinleck walked over to check for a pulse on Mitchell's limp form. The man stirred slightly. The commander picked up the body and threw it into the pit.  
"Why—?" Milner spluttered.  
He limped to the side. Sam followed his line-of-sight. Mitchell lay crumpled at the bottom, at such odd angles that he couldn't possibly be alive.  
"Would you rather admit to manslaughter, not even in self-defence?" the officer said.  
"Yes!" Milner exploded. "What if he were still alive, we might have questioned him!"  
"Speaking of which, how did you get out?" Auchinleck questioned.  
"My aluminium leg," he grinned. "It turned out to be stronger than the lock on the boot."  
"Very clever," the officer remarked. "You know, even now I can't tell which one it is."  
Milner pointed to his prosthetic. Auchinleck drew his pistol and shot him in the other leg, then shoved him after Mitchell.  


Auchinleck turned, heading for the side of the drydock closest to the harbour. Sam grabbed a suitably heavy, long-handled instrument and ran after him. The pair of them had just made it outside when the flares went up. Night turned into day—and a U-boat lay not twenty feet away, decks awash. Sam saw two figures staggering along the soft sand of the beach in a madcap, three-legged race to the conning tower. Auchinleck pelted after them, shouting for Kretschmer to leave the other man behind. One of the two turned, and Sam recognised the quiet, dark-haired officer from the car, now bellowing an obvious refusal. While the spy was distracted, Sam flung her wrench and hit him in the back. He staggered upright just as she reached him. Unfortunately, he had a pistol and she now had nothing.  
"Halt or I shoot!" he ordered.  
"I'm your daughter's age, you won't shoot!" she blurted.  
The Luger pointed directly between her eyes. Sam froze. All of a sudden, exhaustion set in and she found herself sprawled on the sand.  
"Unless you invented the daughters. And the wife, I suppose she was invented too?"  
He shrugged.  
"Tell me, Miss Stewart, is the most effective lie ever more lie than truth? I had an English wife, that's true, but only before the war. She left me, over a bit of Poland! At least I still had my daughters."  
Sam's eyes were fixed on the pistol.  
"That is, until the Lancasters appeared. I remember sitting in the air-raid bunker with Heydrich and Dönitz and all the S.D. briefing staff, wondering which shelter my daughters had found. The wrong one, it turned out. After that, I didn't even get their corpses back."  
Auchinleck still held the pistol. Its muzzle wavered slightly. Twice in a month! Sam couldn't believe her ill-luck: and unlike Jack Archer's, this Luger was definitely loaded.  
"We'll get the U-boat," she remarked. "Not even the Bull of Scapa Flow can possibly get out again."  
"It's true," called a voice.  
"Mr. Foyle!" called Auchinleck.  
Sam craned her neck over her shoulder. Mr. Foyle and six R.N. guardsmen stood on the top of the beach.  
"The U-boat surrendered in the middle of the harbour," he continued. "The captain jumped overboard, he still had his white cap on."  
"You are a terrible liar, Detective Chief Superintendent. And please don't walk any closer unless you want me to shoot your driver."  
Foyle stopped, just short of the sand. He gestured for the ratings to drop their machine pistols.  
"There was a set of Olympic rings on the conning tower," he stated.  
Auchinleck laughed.  
"Crew of 1936 then!"  
He was still chuckling to himself when the flares faded. He fired wildly at Foyle. She threw herself to the ground, barking her shins and her elbows. It wasn't a moment too soon: the chatter of gunfire reached her ears.  
"Stop firing! I'm Corporal Stewart, not some Jerry!" she shouted, but no-one seemed to notice.  
She headed away from the water, keeping her head down. That meant crawling past Auchinleck's body. Sam tried to swallow. It wasn't the first time she had seen a corpse. The eyes stared blankly at her and they seemed to follow her when she crept past. Then she felt very ill.  


That was how Mr. Foyle found her some time later, holding her hair back while she vomited into an empty barrel. Someone gave her a hip flask.  
"Thanks," she muttered.  
She took a hefty swallow. Rum, of course. Sam made a face.  
"Foyle!" Milner shouted.  
She followed his voice to the edge of the repair pit. The broken flashlight lay in the sandstone, some feet away, its tank trailing a dark stain of fuel oil. From the half-working bulb, she could see Milner, collapsed against the side of the pit. Everything above six feet was dark.  
"I'll get the winch!" Foyle called.  
Then she felt very ill again. When the nausea had stopped, she saw a couple of Naval ratings hauling Milner from the pit. He sat on the edge of a workbench, bleeding badly.  
"I'm an utter fool!" he said. "God, everything hurts! Sam?"  
He paused, staring at her with dark eyes still glazed with shock and his hair askew. From the look on Mr. Foyle's face—  
"I've nothing worse than a torn stocking and a few scrapes, don't worry."  
That just made it even worse when she started to sniffle. She tried to explain, but somehow her words just turned into sobs somewhere between her brain and her mouth.  
"He was laughing!" she babbled.  
He died and he was happy about it…it just wasn't right. The vase in the fireplace, with his daughter's dried flowers in it, of all the stupid things to keep popping into her head!  
"It's all right, we've got the prisoners!" said Foyle.  
"Not those two," said Milner grimly.  
One of the ratings handed her the rum again. She took another swig, feeling more like a pirate than a detective, and wiped her mouth on her sleeve for good measure.  
"The First Sea Lord is going to have fits, with Hitler's top aces all on the loose again," he said.  
"I'm going to have fits!" snapped Foyle. "What the devil were you two thinking?"  
To her surprise, Milner leapt to her defence.  
"Sir, she did a fine job."  
He turned to Sam.  
"There were a dozen things you might have said which would have had you shot instead."  
"Milner, do you enjoy it when I suddenly become a damsel in distress?"  
"What if you had told him about Andrew being in the R.A.F.? That would have put a bullet in your skull just to spite a fighter pilot!"  
She handed the flask to no-one in particular. Foyle took it. At the sight of Auchinleck's body, Sam watched Foyle's mouth harden.  
"We might have learned something," he said wearily. "I suppose you shot the two captains as well?"  
"No," said one of the ratings. "Kretschmer ran faster than we did, even with half an ace on his shoulders."  
"But that's why Auchinleck was there, to distract me into letting them get away!" Sam exclaimed. "Don't tell me I stood there with a gun to my head for nothing!"  
They fell silent.  
"Rings?" Foyle asked. "Doesn't the Bull of Scapa Flow have the expected on his U-boat?"  
"But we know the U-boat's emblem: we saw it when the flares went up," said the rating. "The captain must have got his stripes when the Olympics were in Berlin."  
"Not Prien: he was the class of '31," said another. "Why not use his lucky boat, the one with the bull on it?"  
The commander had been laughing. He had started when she talked about the rings. He would have known all about the operation. Why give the aces the chess piece from Prien's wife if some arbitrary U-boat ace was picking them up?  
"Two boats," she whispered.  
Perhaps if she said it quietly enough, it wouldn't be true.  



	9. Chapter 9

Foyle switched off the wireless. Prime Minister Churchill was in fine form, but even he was unable to disguise the severity of the situation. Six months earlier, the British had been trumpeting the capture or death of Dönitz's top aces, men who had sunk half a million tons of shipping in less than a year. Now the Royal Navy was arse-about-face trying to make things look decent.  
"Are we ever going to hear the end of this, sir?" Milner asked.  
Foyle fingered the unopened, brown envelope on his desk. It had been delivered to the station that morning, to the constable on duty, by a man of entirely forgettable appearance. No handwriting offered a clue to its sender, nor was there a return address. All of those facts, in conjunction, identified the source perfectly. Eventually he pushed it to Milner's side of the desk as if made of nitroglycerin instead of parchment paper.  
"Shall we find out?" Foyle questioned.  
His subordinate slid open the envelope.  
"How is your German? It's a magazine article, from something called _Signal_."  
Foyle chuckled.  
"Try the colour plate on the reverse."  
"Our two escaped submariners are back home, I see," Milner assessed gloomily. "I'm sure there's no mention of the ones who are still locked up in Sussex."  
The D.S. traced the faces on the image absently. Three men crowded the conning-tower of a U-boat. There was Kretschmer, sharp-jawed and quick-eyed; the white cap signified that the man next to him must have been Prien; the two dark-haired men had hoisted Schepke onto their shoulders like some statue of the Aryan ideal. On the French dockside nearby waited the entire pomp and ceremony of the German propaganda machine.  
"I owe you an apology, Milner."  
He could taste the guilt, as oily and bitter in the back of his throat as the fuel vapours had been. Nonetheless, he confessed to the dark crown of Milner's hair. His subordinate's eyes were still fixed on the colour plate.  
"I knew that I was sending you into a trap. After that, it doesn't really matter, does it? One spy or two, I still placed your life in danger for very little gain."  
"We had no evidence against Auchinleck, or whoever he was. Criston Ross had blown his cover. We're bloody lucky that you didn't send Mitchell by himself."  
"I don't mean that!" he snapped.  
He took a breath. The man in front of him had sat in the same office a year ago, asking to resign due to poor judgement. He had a bloody cheek not permitting Foyle to suggest that he was incapable of the same!  
"I never should have tried to close the operation while you were still in Wales. Had I gone into H.M.S. Forward with backup, Auchinleck would never have found my papers and been allowed to run amok. Sam would never have stumbled across the ration books and forged money, but the distribution would have stopped all the same. Lizzie Fairbanks and Neil Ritchie would still be alive."  
Was that minute inclination of his head a nod?  
"The parachute…" Milner muttered.  
"I didn't know about both spies. It ought to have been obvious that there were two—otherwise why need the parachute?—and once Ross was eliminated, no-one but Mitchell was left."  
"Mitchell…Was the man who called the Stukas down on us at Trondheim writing to the men who survived all along? I saw him get shot up, you see, and after that I never dreamed that he might be one of them."  
His hands rose from his lap of their own volition. Foyle stopped himself from patting Milner on the shoulder, or seizing the man by his coat lapels. Had the desk not separated them, Foyle might have done something rather foolish.  
"If it's any consolation, I doubt he was. Not until captivity, before the Sicherheitsdienst turned him and let him loose again."  
"You only trusted him thanks to me. If I had only…"   
Milner trailed off.  
"Only, Milner? Not trusted your instincts? Permitted a self-confessed murderer to accompany you to a crime scene? Or perhaps trailed Sam everywhere like an over-protective father? I for one, am secretly glad that you didn't. So are you, I suspect."  
Paul Milner glanced up at him. At last, the man had the courage to look him in the eye.  
"Or would you rather that Military Intelligence or the Special Operations Executive had quietly whisked you away from rural policing to an exciting job closer to the war effort?"  
Both of them managed a smile. Milner handed over the article, posted from wherever Criston Ross was now based.  
"Crime is crime, sir. We both agree that war doesn't change that. We arrested a man for murder, destroyed a local forgery ring, solved a disappearance. How much is our justice worth? Another quarter of million tonnes of shipping? How many tanks and troops and how much steel or tea or wheat is that?"  
Foyle walked over to his filing cabinet and pulled a small blue book from the file marked "BRIGHTON RATIONS MAY-AUGUST 1941." He placed it carefully on the desk.  
"If you would rather have a full stomach than a sense of justice, why not use that?"  
Milner snorted. Both of them knew that that book wasn't going anywhere outside Foyle's file—particularly that it wouldn't find its way to any of the local constables.  
"We would both sleep easier if the cigarette and tea ration were the only items destroyed by those submariners. Men are going to die because of the good that we did. Is it still good?"  
Foyle returned the forged ration book to his file.  
"I certainly think so. Utilitarian morality is all very well if one is a philosopher, but I think we've been through enough together to know that that isn't the way the real world works. When I was your age, I wanted everything to be black and white. As I get older, I find the greys more interesting."  
"So you believe that morality is ambiguous, sir?"  
"Not at all, Milner. Not at all."  



End file.
